Chapter 35

The Visitation Of The Bishop

 

 

Tomorrow would be New Year’s Eve but today was just a normal working Wednesday, although she didn’t feel much like working today, as Cass was waiting for the promised arrival of good old Call-Me-Ken. The kettle had been on and off the Rayburn every few minutes, waiting to make the bishop’s coffee.

At last the knock at the door came and Bishop Ken stood on her doorstep, looking somewhat more windblown and cold than he usually did after his walk down to Old Rawscar.

‘Bishop … do come in …’ Cass said, opening the door wider for him. ‘Would you like a cup of coffee?’

‘I would, Cassandra, thank you. What a quaint little cottage!’ He was looking all around him. Bishop Ken was a large man in every sense of the word, physically imposing with a shock of white hair and a booming upper-class voice, used to delivering Cathedral sermons. His huge presence made Maidensbower seem tiny as he levered himself into the fireside chair.

‘It is lovely, isn’t it?’ Cass said conversationally over her shoulder as she put the kettle on in the kitchen, finding a couple of clean mugs from the pile on the draining board that she should have put away yesterday. She tucked the large pile of papers from the kitchen table into one of the cupboards, suddenly aware of how untidy the cottage was looking. Anna didn’t seem to mind her clutter, but the bishop might. As she tried to sound casual, her mind was racing away. What had he come to say to her?

She brought two mugs of coffee through and sat at the far end of the sofa, as far away from the bishop as possible.

‘I’m glad I could meet you like this, Cassandra. Talking over the telephone seems so distant, doesn’t it? And I think that you and I need to face a few truths together, which may be difficult for you to accept.’

He was going to tell her that she had to give up Hal, that was the only thing it could possibly be; as a vicar, a man like Hal was off limits to her.

‘I have always admired your single-mindedness; your dedication to your calling. But Cassandra, do you not feel that you have denied yourself something important when you turned your back on human love?’

‘I haven’t …’ she gasped. ‘I never did that!’

‘I think that is why it has turned the whole experience into such a dilemma for you. But loving God and loving another person do not have to exclude each other.’

‘But … I loved James and it never felt like this; like I was tipping over the edge of a cliff and I don’t know whether I’m going to fly or fall.’

The bishop paused for a moment, glancing out of the window.

‘I think you loved the idea of James, just as he loved the idea of you, but I think what both of you found in the other was a mirror of yourself. Now, perhaps for the first time in your life, you love someone who is outside that little zone of comfort and certainty that you have created, and that scares you. This young man you love is not safe, is not approved and so you are afraid of where your feelings will lead you. No doubt physical desire plays a part in how you feel, perhaps for the first time.’

Cass could feel herself blushing. This was not how she had expected the conversation to go at all. She tried to deny it, but she knew that Ken could see right through her; her flushed face and the fact that her hands were starting to feel sweaty must be giving her away. She was talking to Call-Me-Ken about sex.

‘Now, I personally do not believe,’ he continued, ‘that the physical expression of one person’s love for another should be considered a sin, if it is shared in a spirit of loving one-ness with each other, of mutual giving and trust and, yes, enjoyment, each of the other. As long as it is done with a loving and spirit and not merely …’ he seemed to be struggling for the word.

‘Carnality?’ Cass prompted.

‘Indeed, indeed, Cassandra. I could not have chosen a better word. Carnality.’ He looked rather pleased with himself, stretching forwards to warm his hands at the fire.

‘There are others who would disagree, of course,’ he continued, looking back at her, ‘and it is not the official view of the church hierarchy, so this is what I say to you simply as one human being to another, and not as your bishop. There are many times I have thought privately that what the Church says we must do and what Jesus says we must do are not always entirely the same. I think, Cassandra, you should ask yourself what Jesus would do. In my view, truly loving and being loved by another human being is a gift from God. When I met my Mary, God rest her soul, that is indeed how I felt, that our love, both spiritual and physical was a gift from God.’

Oh help! The bishop was going to start telling her about his sex life if she didn’t change the subject and move things on.

‘I’m sure!’ Cass said hurriedly, springing to her feet, but she seemed to have been temporarily robbed of her ability to think straight. ‘Wasn’t there something else you wanted to talk to me about?’

‘Indeed, Cassandra, the other reason that I am here. I need to tell you some truths that you may find difficult at first. I have pondered the wisdom of telling you many times, because since your mother’s tragic loss, I am perhaps the only person who knows the full story. I know how much you loved your father. I know how much his example means to you, and I thought for many years that to take the inspiration that you found in his life and work away from you would be damaging and unkind. But now I see you struggling to live up to an impossible ideal, which will destroy you, and at the heart of that, I see your father.’

What did any of this have to do with Hal and love and sex? Why bring her father into it now? Unless there was something concerned with love - or sex - and her father that she didn’t know about. That she didn’t want to know about. Cass began to feel physically sick. She walked over to the kitchen door to cover her confusion.

‘I need to check on Twiggy, just one minute.’

“An impossible ideal”, that’s how he had described her father. A moment in the kitchen on her own allowed her to catch her breath. She didn’t know whether she wanted to hear what the Bishop had to say. She had so little left, was the Bishop going to destroy the one ideal she had always had? Her father’s example, good and strong in faith as he had been – or she had thought he had been. But she couldn’t turn back now; she had to find out. What if he had been unfaithful to her mother? What if he had slept with other people, or even worse, what if he had been one of those vicars?  Her wild imaginings were worse than not knowing.

Ken stood up to face her as she came back into the room.

‘I’m ready,’ she said, but she didn’t sit down again and neither did he, as if both of them were poised for flight if things went wrong.

‘Your father was a good vicar and a good man – not to mention a good friend of mine. He was a fine example for his congregation; nothing can change any of that nor take it away from him. Please remember that, Cassandra, but your father was not without fault, and your father was human too. Your mother found it hard to accept after his death that he was not blameless, and she wanted you to see him as perfect too, but he wasn’t always blameless.’

Oh Lord, he must have done something awful!

The bishop took a deep breath and stepped towards her. He spoke calmly and sadly without giving her a chance to interrupt.

‘On the night your father died, he was indeed driving home from Midnight Mass, and did indeed hit a tree because of a drunk driver, but there is something else, Cassandra.’

‘There was someone else in the car, wasn’t there? He was with another woman; he was having an affair? Or another man?’ She found it spilling out before she could help herself, as she took a couple of quick steps towards him.

‘No, no! Not at all, nothing like that! He was entirely faithful to your mother as far as I know.’ The bishop sounded shocked that she should even have thought it, holding up his hands in defence. ‘There was no-one else in the car. In fact, Cassandra there was no-one else involved in the accident at all.’

‘But what about the car that ran him off the road? The drunk driver? I don’t understand.’

Bishop Ken took a deep breath and another step so that he was standing right before her, speaking gently.

‘He left the road as the result of a drunk driver. What I’m trying to say is that … your father was that drunk driver. He had been drinking before Midnight Mass, he had taken the service in a state of inebriation, and he tried to drive home afterwards. He ran his own car into that tree, Cassandra.’

He paused, watching her carefully; she found she couldn’t respond at first. This was not what she had been expecting at all; in some ways it was a relief to find that there were no allegations of abuse or affairs, but this?

It was as if the bishop could read her mind.

‘Your mother wanted you to remember your father as a good man, a good role model. She could blame him for his failings in the form of the “drunk driver” who caused the accident, without telling you the identity of the drunkard. A dead father is easier to idolise than a living one, and somehow she made him into a saint in your mind. Your poor father was a good and kind man, but he had weaknesses and faults – yes, and sins – just like any other man. You should not punish yourself because you are not like the picture of him that your mother painted for you. You should be free to love and to learn and to live your own life, and yes, make your own mistakes.’

He fell silent and sat back down again, watching her. Cass stood still, thinking hard. It was as if a cold wave of truth had washed over her, knocking the breath from her body like the North Sea waves had done when she went after Anna. Yet at the same time, the aftermath of that wave made her feel somehow clearer, harder. Washed clean.

‘We are all human, Cassandra. We have all sinned; we have all known what it is to struggle. I myself more than most.’ He looked up at her, as if waiting for her to infer something from what he had said. She didn’t know what it was she was meant to be deducing.

‘How do you mean?’

‘When your father met me, as I have often told you it was in a young offenders’ institution, but I wasn’t part of the ministry team. I don’t speak of it much, but I’d like you to know the truth, that all of us are sinners, struggling to find the way, the truth and the life.’

‘You mean …’ she didn’t want to say it in case she had got it wrong again. Surely the bishop couldn’t have been in the institution?

‘I believed in nothing and no-one. I was lost. It was your father who showed me the way and saved me. He was a truly good and inspirational man, Cassandra, never forget that, it’s simply that he was not faultless.’

‘Well, I …’ she didn’t know what to say to him, all she could think was, what on earth would Bishop Ken have been doing in a young-offenders’ institution? She couldn’t ask him, he was a bishop after all and she wasn’t going to even try and come to any conclusions about it. For a moment, she thought of googling it after he had left to see what she could find out, but she didn’t need to do that. After they had exchanged pleasantries, said goodbye, and he was leaving the cottage, he turned half way down Maiden’s Yard.

‘I know what you’re wondering. You want to know why I was in there, don’t you?’

‘I …’ she thought about denying her curiosity, but she couldn’t. ‘What had you done, Ken?’ she asked, softly.

‘In the ultimate irony of ironies, I set fire to my school chapel, Cassandra. My very ancient, very expensive private school chapel, which burnt to the ground, taking most of the school with it.’

Then, with a cheery wave he was away down the not-so-straight and narrow path.