Scandalous Risks
Scandalous Risks
Susan Howatch
The author’s most famous and well-loved work, the Starbridge series, six self-contained yet interconnected novels that explore the history of the Church of England through the 20th century.In 1963, when traditional values are coming under attack, a young woman in her twenties, Venetia Flaxton, becomes disastrously involved with her best friend's father, the powerful, dynamic but ultimately mysterious Dean of Starbridge Cathedral. Yet, as a married man and a senior Churchman, Aysgarth has nothing to offer her but an admiration which spirals out of control into an obsessive love. As Aysgarth begins to take scandalous risks to further their friendship, pressures rise and the dangers multiply. Venetia finds herself trapped in a desperate web of love and lies from which it seems impossible to escape.Witty, compassionate and compelling, Scandalous Risks explores not only the reality of sin and the fantasy of sexual obsession, but the overpowering human need for redemption, love and lasting happiness.
Susan Howatch
SCANDALOUS RISKS
COPYRIGHT (#u1a2015f4-5a4f-576d-b3e6-9f4b56d41963)
This novel is entirely a work of fiction.The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
HARPER
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First published in Great Britain by William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd 1990, then in paperback by Fontana 1991 and by HarperCollinsPublishers 1993
Copyright © Leaftree Ltd 1990
The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 978000739642
EBook Edition © JUNE 2012 ISBN: 9780007396412
Version: 2016-10-05
CONTENTS
COVER (#u9ded64ff-f19e-5c6f-af01-fdf6b711ed3c)
TITLE PAGE (#u1f7fa8fb-19e8-5a19-8617-23e47f3fea33)
COPYRIGHT
PART ONE
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
PART TWO
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
PART THREE
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
PART FOUR
ONE
TWO
KEEP READING (#litres_trial_promo)
AUTHOR’S NOTE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PRAISE
ALSO BY THE AUTHOR
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
PART ONE (#u1a2015f4-5a4f-576d-b3e6-9f4b56d41963)
THE GARDEN (#u1a2015f4-5a4f-576d-b3e6-9f4b56d41963)
‘For the true radical is not the man who wants to root out the tares from the wheat so as to make the Church perfect: it is only too easy on these lines to reform the Church into a walled garden. The true radical is the man who continually subjects the Church … to the claims of God in the increasingly non-religious world which the Church exists to serve.’
JOHN A. T. ROBINSON
Suffragan Bishop of Woolwich 1959–1969
Honest to God
ONE (#u1a2015f4-5a4f-576d-b3e6-9f4b56d41963)
‘We all need, more than anything else, to love and be loved.’
JOHN A. T. ROBINSON
Suffragan Bishop of Woolwich 1959–1969
Writing about Honest to God in the Sunday Mirror, 7th April 1963
I
I never meant to return to the scene of my great disaster. But one day, after yet another wasted weekend among alcoholic adulterers, I took a wrong turn on the motorway and saw the sign to Starbridge. Immediately I tried to escape. I drove up the next slip-road, but as I crossed the bridge to complete the U-turn I made the mistake of glancing south, and there, far away in the gap between the hills, I saw the spire of the Cathedral.
1988 dissolved into 1963. I glimpsed again my Garden of Eden, and as I hesitated at the wheel of my car, the rope of memory yanked me forward into the past. I forgot the U-turn, I forgot the motorway, I forgot my wasted weekend. On I drove to Starbridge along that well-remembered road which snaked between the hills before slithering to the floor of the valley, and ahead, appearing and disappearing with each twist of the road like some hypnotic mirage, the Cathedral grew steadily larger in the limpid summer light.
The city stood in the heart of the valley, but it was the Cathedral, eerie in its extreme beauty, which dominated the landscape, and as I stared at the spire I saw again that vanished world where the Beatles still had short hair, and skirts were yet to rise far above the knee and the senior men of the Church of England still dressed in archaic uniforms. Then as I remembered the Church in those last innocent days before the phrase ‘permissive society’ had been invented, I thought not only of those scandalous risks taken by Bishop John Robinson when he had written his best seller Honest to God, but of the scandalous risks taken by my Mr Dean as he had run his Cathedral and dallied with disaster and indulged in his dangerous dreams.
I reached the outskirts of the city.
It was very old. The Romans had built their city Starovinium on the site formerly occupied by the British tribe the Starobrigantes; the Anglo-Saxons had converted Starovinium into Starbrigga, a landmark in King Alfred’s Wessex; the Normans had recorded the town as Starbrige in Domesday Book, and Starbrige it had remained until the author of an eighteenth-century guidebook had fabricated the legend that the name was derived from the Norman bridge across the River Star. Starbridge then acquired its modern spelling, but the link with its remote origins lingered on in the Bishop’s official designation. In theory married to his diocese, he was entitled to use ‘Staro’ as his surname whenever he wrote his signature. I had no idea who the current bishop of Starbridge was, but I could remember the bishop of twenty-five years ago as clearly as I could remember the Cathedral’s dean.
I drove into the city but it was not as I had known it. Starbridge had been raped in the later years of the 1960s, like so many other dignified county towns. The new housing estates now stretched to the cemetery; there was a bypass, a shocking aberration on concrete stilts – how my Mr Dean would have hated that! – and in the oldest part of the town I found a one-way traffic system so baffling that I had to circle the market-place three times before I could find my way out. Then I got lost in the network of streets I had known so well, the streets around St Martin’s-in-Cripplegate. Butchers’ Alley was a pedestrian precinct; Chasuble Lane was blocked by a NO ENTRY sign. Completely confused I fled down Mitre Street only to find a hideous multi-storey car-park leering at me as I flashed by Marks and Spencer’s, but ahead I could see the traffic lights of Eternity Street and with relief I realised that the past was finally at hand. Seconds later, still swearing and sweating after my excursion in the maze, I was driving through the arched gateway into the Cathedral Close.
At once the constable on duty flagged me down. I was told that no parking was available unless I was calling on diocesan business or visiting a resident. I almost declared: ‘I’ve come to see the Dean!’ but somehow I hauled myself back to 1988, produced a five-pound note and said instead: ‘Would this do?’ The constable was deeply shocked. He said: ‘I’m afraid not, madam,’ and in rage I retired to the multi-storey car-park, but I felt cheered to learn that even now, in the heart of Mrs Thatcher’s England, there were still some things which were not for sale.
I left my Mercedes sulking by a down-market Ford and emerged from the car-park into a street which ran down to the Crusader Hotel. I was progressing at last. The Crusader faced St Anne’s Gate, the pedestrian entrance to the Cathedral precinct, and a minute later I was entering the huge walled enclosure of the Close.
The Cathedral rose from the lawn of the churchyard like a vast cliff towering upwards from a beach. The building still had the power to bring me gasping to a halt, but no sooner had I told myself that nothing had altered than I realised the place was awash with tourists. The Japanese, the Americans, the Germans, the French – all were on parade with their cameras and their guides, and amidst the flotillas of foreigners the English drifted idly, grey-haired ladies on outings, hikers with backpacks, even a bunch of teenage bores with beer cans, their ghetto-blasters silenced by the Constable of the Close. I was just marvelling at the diversity of these superfluous people when I became aware that they were united by their behaviour: they were all constantly looking up, and at last I looked up too; I looked beyond the slim windows, beyond the gargoyles, beyond the roof of the nave to the great cross which marked the summit of the spire.
That at least was unchanged.
But soon I felt the crowds were oppressive, and in the hope of escaping from them I tried to enter the Cathedral. The main doors of the west front were closed. So was the door in the north porch. Between the hours of ten and five, I discovered, all tourists were channelled through a side-door by the cloisters where turnstiles heralded a request for money. ‘It’s only a voluntary contribution, of course,’ said the dragon on duty at the cash-register. I flung her the five-pound note which the constable had refused. In shock she gabbled her thanks but I ignored her and stalked into the Cathedral.
It was infested with tourists. They swarmed and buzzed and hummed and clattered. Official guides droned. Cameras flashed illicitly. In horror I fled down the side-aisle of the nave and re-entered the cloisters by the door in the south transept, but even in that secluded quadrangle it proved impossible for me to be alone with my memories. A bevy of matrons declared that everything was ‘awesome’ and ‘wondrous’ and far better than that cathedral they had seen yesterday or was it the day before. Elbowing my way past them I tried to find the wooden seat where my Mr Dean and I had sat so often, but it had been removed. Tears stung my eyes. I felt I was engaged in an exercise of overpowering futility. My Garden of Eden had been ploughed under. Here I stood, in one of the greatest cathedrals in England, and it was no more than a Disneyland theme-park. God was absent. There was no whiff of holiness, no whisper of religion and not even a clergyman in sight.
But then I saw my clergyman. I glanced down the north colonnade at the moment that he entered the cloisters by the transept door. It was not my Mr Dean; he was long dead. It was the man I had labelled my Talisman. He recurred in my life. I thought of him as a portent, sometimes heralding disaster but often merely signifying change. Some years had elapsed since we had last met, but now here he was again, a tall thin man some five or six years my junior with straight brown hair and a strong-boned face. He was no longer wearing glasses but I recognised him at once. He had more trouble recognising me. I saw him look in my direction, glance away, then stop to look back. The tourists swarmed between us, but as he moved forward they automatically stepped aside to make way for him.
‘Venetia?’ he said amazed, and at once as I saw myself through his eyes I realised how odd my presence must have seemed. It was surely not often that a raddled wreck of a society woman was washed up on such a beautiful but polluted shore.
‘Hullo, soothsayer!’ I said, instinctively assuming a synthetic gaiety, although why I attempted to deceive him about my state of mind I have no idea. I should have realised that the passing years would only have heightened his intuitive powers.
‘This place is worse than Piccadilly Circus,’ he said, ignoring my pathetic attempt to be debonair. ‘Want to be rescued?’
‘Passionately.’
‘Follow me.’
With an unutterable relief I hurried after him as he led the way around the quadrangle. The door on the south side was marked PRIVATE but my Talisman, that human amulet who could achieve extraordinary results, ignored the sign and drew me into the stonemasons’ yard beyond the wall. Various workmen, engaged in the unending task of restoring the Cathedral’s fabric, were moving among the blocks of stone, but no one queried our presence. My companion’s clerical collar was no doubt sufficient to rebuff any thought of a challenge. On the far side of the yard we reached a second door. This one was marked CHOIR SCHOOL ONLY, but once again my Talisman, ignoring the sign, led me through the doorway into another world.
‘It’s the garden of the old episcopal palace,’ he said. ‘Ever been here?’
‘No.’ The palace had been ceded to the Choir School after the war, and by the time I had started moving among the ecclesiastical élite of Starbridge, the Bishop had lived in the house known as the South Canonry on the other side of the Close.
I suddenly realised there were no other human beings in sight. A silence broken only by bird-song enveloped us. The garden shimmered bewitchingly in the hot bright light.
‘Where are all the choirboys?’ I said, hardly able to believe such peace was not in imminent danger of destruction.
‘On holiday. Relax,’ said my Talisman, and led the way past a shrubbery to a newly-mown lawn which stretched to the river. Weeping willows trailed their branches in the water, and beyond the far bank meadows strewn with buttercups unfolded towards the hazy blue outline of the hills which surrounded the valley. The only building in sight was a farmhouse a mile away. Although we stood in the heart of Starbridge, nothing had changed on this flank of the city where the river looped around the mound on which the Cathedral stood. The water-meadows had been preserved as common land since the Middle Ages and protected in recent years by the National Trust.
As we sat down on a weathered bench by the water I said: ‘How clever of you to bring me to a place where the past survives intact!’
‘You were looking for the past?’
‘God knows what I was looking for.’
‘The past can survive in many forms,’ said my companion, ‘and unlike this beautiful view, not all those forms are benign.’
‘Quite. Hence the massive fees commanded by psychoanalysts.’
‘There are other liberators.’
‘Don’t you mean con-men?’
‘No, con-men can’t open the prison gates once the past has become a jail.’
‘No magic wand?’
‘No magic password.’
‘And what, may I ask, is the magic password of the true liberator?’
‘“Forgive”.’
The conversation ceased but the river glided on, the brilliant light glittering so fiercely on the water that my eyes began to ache. Looking away I saw that my right hand was gripping the arm of the seat. The paint on my fingernails was the colour of blood, and suddenly I saw myself as someone who had long suffered a debilitating haemorrhage but had abandoned all hope of a cure.
‘You’re wasting your time,’ I said. ‘I’m beyond liberation. Run away and liberate someone else.’ And then before I could stop myself I was exclaiming in despair: ‘I wish I’d never come back to this place! Usually I never even think of that bloody, bloody year –’
‘Which year?’
‘1963, but I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘That was the year of Honest to God, wasn’t it? I remember it well – and I remember you too, full of joie de vivre –’
‘Oh yes, that was me, oozing joie de vivre from every pore –’
‘So what went wrong?’
There was another silence before I answered: ‘Well, you see …’ But I was unable to finish the sentence. Then I said: ‘Well, to put the matter in a nutshell …’ But again I had to stop. It was only after yet another silence that I heard myself say in a voice devoid of emotion as I confessed the emotion I could never forget: ‘Well, the trouble was … I became so very, very fond of my darling Mr Dean.’
II
My Mr Dean had been christened Norman Neville and during the course of his career he had possessed various clerical titles, but I shall refer to him throughout this narrative by his surname, Aysgarth, because it was the one designation which never changed. He had left the name Norman behind in infancy when his mother decided to call him Neville, and he had left the name Neville behind in the 1940s when his ghastly second wife insisted on addressing him as Stephen; she had declared that the name Neville had been ruined by the unfortunate Mr Chamberlain, and that only a pure, noble, serious name such as Stephen could ever be good enough for the man she intended to marry. It had apparently never occurred to her that these dreary adjectives hardly did her husband justice, but Aysgarth, whose tolerance of his wife’s peculiarities bordered on the masochistic, had raised no objection to this despotic rechristening, and after his second marriage in 1945 the number of people who knew him as Neville had steadily declined.
‘If any woman tried to alter my name I’d put her in her place pretty damned quickly, I assure you!’ my father declared once to my mother when I was growing up, although in fact Aysgarth’s Christian name was irrelevant to him. My father was old-fashioned enough to call all men outside our family by their surnames, so although he and Aysgarth were close friends the relationship sounded more formal than it was. For years after their first meeting Aysgarth had addressed my father as ‘my Lord’ or ‘Lord Flaxton’, but in 1957 after Aysgarth received his great preferment my father had said to him: ‘Time to dispense with the title – address me as Flaxton in future.’ This invitation, so condescendingly delivered, was intended – and received – as a compliment. Indeed Aysgarth, who was the son of a failed Yorkshire draper, was so overcome that he blushed like a schoolboy.
‘Dear Mr Aysgarth!’ mused my mother long ago in the 1940s when I was still a child. ‘Not quite a gentleman, of course, but such a charming way with him at dinner-parties!’
My father and I first met Aysgarth on the same day in 1946. I was nine, my father was fifty-five and Aysgarth, then the Archdeacon of Starbridge, was forty-four. I had been sent home early from school after throwing an inkpot at some detestable girl who had called my father a ‘barmy peer’. I hated this local hell-hole and longed for a governess, but my father, whose idealism forced him to subscribe to the view that patricians should make efforts to mix with the plebeians, was resolute in sending all his daughters to school. The schools were private; my mother would certainly have balked at the prospect of her daughters being sacrificed on the altar of state education, so I never met the so-called ‘lower orders’, only the infamous middle classes who, I quickly learnt, considered it their mission in life to ‘take snooty, la-di-da pigs down a peg or two.’ If the middle classes hadn’t been so busy conquering the world for England in the nineteenth century I doubt if the upper classes would have survived into the twentieth.
‘You did quite right to throw the inkpot!’ said my father after I had defended my behaviour by telling him how he had been abused. ‘One can’t take insults lying down – I’ve no patience with Christians who waffle on about turning the other cheek!’
‘And talking of Christians,’ said my mother before my father could give his well-worn performance as an agnostic lion rampant, ‘don’t forget the Archdeacon’s calling on you this afternoon.’
‘What’s an archdeacon?’ I said, delighted that my father had supported me over the inkpot and anxious to retain his attention.
‘Look it up in the dictionary.’ He glanced at his watch, set me firmly aside and walked out.
I was skulking sulkily in the hall five minutes later when the doorbell rang and I decided to play the butler. I opened the front door. In the porch stood a short, broad-shouldered man who was dressed in a uniform which suggested an eccentric chauffeur. He had brown hair, rather bushy, and the kind of alert expression which one so often sees on the faces of gun-dogs. His eyes were a vivid blue.
‘All chauffeurs should go to the back entrance,’ I said, speaking grandly to conceal how unnerved I was by this curious apparition in gaiters.
‘I’m not a chauffeur – I’m an archdeacon,’ he said smiling at me, and asked my name. To put him to the test I answered poker-faced: ‘Vanilla,’ but he surmounted the challenge with ease. ‘How very charming and original!’ he exclaimed, not batting an eyelid, and told me I reminded him of Alice in Wonderland.
I was hardly able to believe that any adult could be so agreeable. ‘If I’m Alice,’ I said, testing him again to make sure I was not mistaken, ‘who are you?’
‘If you’re Alice, I think I’d like to be Lewis Carroll,’ said my future Mr Dean, exuding the charm which was to win my mother’s approval, and that was the moment when I knew for certain that he was my favourite kind of person, bright and sharp, quick and tough, yet kind enough to have time for a plain little girl with ink-stained fingers and an insufferable air of grandeur.
My father’s reaction to Aysgarth was startlingly similar to mine. ‘I like that man,’ he kept saying afterwards. ‘I like him.’ He sounded amazed. Hitherto he had regarded all clergymen as the victims of an intellectual aberration.
‘You’ll never believe this,’ said my mother that evening on the telephone to my elder brother in London, ‘but your father’s fallen violently in love with a clergyman – no, not the local parson who’s gone round the bend! Your father complained about the parson to the Bishop, and the Bishop sent the Archdeacon to investigate, and it’s the Archdeacon who’s won your father’s heart. Your father’s even saying he’s seen the Virgin Birth in a new light – he’s dreadfully unsettled, poor dear.’
This evidently alarmed my brother very much. Outraged squawks emerged from the telephone.
However the truth was that my father was neither suffering from the onset of senility nor undergoing a religious conversion. He was merely having to upgrade his opinion of clergymen because Aysgarth, an Oxford graduate, was one of those rare beings, my father’s intellectual equal. A clergyman who had won a first in theology could be dismissed; theology was not a subject which my father took seriously. But a clergyman who had been at Balliol, my father’s own college, and taken a first in Greats, that Olympian academic prize which even my father had had to toil to achieve – there indeed was a clergyman who defied dismissal.
‘I’ve come to the conclusion that Mr Aysgarth’s a great blessing,’ said my mother to me later. ‘Clever men like your papa become bored if they don’t have other clever men to talk to, so perhaps now he’s discovered Mr Aysgarth he won’t be such a crosspatch whenever he’s obliged to leave London and spend time at Flaxton Hall.’
I said: ‘If I read Greats up at Oxford, would Papa like me better?’
‘Darling, what a thing to say! Papa adores you – look how he stood up for you about the inkpot! Papa and I love all our children,’ said my mother vaguely, wandering away from me to attend to her plants in the conservatory, ‘and you’re a very lucky little girl to belong to such a happy family.’
I stood alone, staring after her, and wished I could be one of the exotic plants to which she paid so much devoted attention.
III
Aysgarth had a brother, who taught classics at a minor public school in Sussex, and a sister, who lived in the south London suburbs, but these siblings were rarely mentioned; he was fond of them but they had no place in the world he had carved out for himself since he had entered the Church. He had decided to be a clergyman when he was up at Oxford on his scholarship. This had been a brave decision, since he had had no money and no influential clerical connections, but Aysgarth was capable of great daring and possessed the iron nerves of a successful gambler.
‘Aysgarth may look the soul of propriety in his clerical uniform,’ my father remarked once to my mother, ‘but by God, he takes scandalous risks!’ My father often talked riskily, particularly when he succumbed to the childish urge to shock people he disliked, but in fact he lived a very conventional life for a man of his class. If he had been Aysgarth, obliged to make his own way in the world, he would have played safe, using the Oxford scholarship to follow an academic career. To enter the Church, where salaries were risible and worldly success for any self-made man was unlikely, would have struck my father as being reckless to the point of lunacy. Outwardly opposed to Christianity but inwardly attracted to the aspects which coincided with his own old-fashioned, sentimental liberal humanism, he was enthralled by the madcap idealism which seemed to him to characterise Aysgarth’s choice of a profession.
‘It was such a courageous step to take, Aysgarth!’
‘Nonsense! God called me to serve Him in the Church, so that was that. One doesn’t argue with God.’
‘But your intellect – surely you were obliged to give rational consideration to –’
‘What could be more rational than the decision to use my gifts in a way which would most clearly manifest my moral and intellectual convictions?’
My father was silent. Unable to risk believing in knowledge which his arrogant intellect deemed unknowable, he was speechless when confronted by Aysgarth’s act of faith. No rhetoric from an evangelist could have dented my father’s agnosticism, but Aysgarth, never speaking of Christianity unless my father raised the subject, presented the most powerful apologetic merely by revealing his life story. My father was baffled but respectful, disapproving yet filled with admiration.
‘But how did you have the nerve to marry when you were still a curate? Wasn’t that an absolutely scandalous risk for a penniless young man to take?’
‘I’d been engaged for seven years – wouldn’t it have been even more of a scandalous risk if I’d waited a day longer?’ retorted Aysgarth, and added to my mother as if he knew he could rely on her sympathy: ‘I regarded my first wife as the great prize which lay waiting for me at the end of my early struggles to get on in the world.’
‘So romantic!’ sighed my mother predictably.
‘Mr Aysgarth,’ I said, fascinated by his unembarrassed reference earlier in the conversation to the Deity whom my family felt it bad taste to discuss, ‘did God tell you to marry, just as He told you to be a clergyman?’
‘Be quiet, Venetia, and don’t interrupt,’ said my father irritably. ‘Sophie, why isn’t that child in bed?’
But my Mr Dean – my Mr Archdeacon as he was then – merely winked at me and said: ‘We might talk about God one day, Vanilla, if you’ve nothing better to do,’ and when both my parents demanded to know why he was addressing me as if I were an ice-cream, I realised with gratitude that he had diverted them from all thought of my bedtime.
According to various people who could remember her, Aysgarth’s first wife had been beautiful, intelligent, charming, religious and utterly devoted to her husband and children. Aysgarth seldom mentioned her but once when he said: ‘Grace was much too good for me,’ he sounded so abrupt that I realised any question about her would have exacerbated a grief which was still capable of being painfully recalled. The marriage had produced five children, four boys and a girl, Primrose, who was my age. The children were all either brilliantly clever or remarkably good-looking or, as in the case of Christian and Norman, both. James, the third son, was good-looking but not clever, and Alexander, the youngest, was clever but not good-looking. Primrose, who had a face like a horse, was brilliant and I became close friends with her, but I shall return to the subject of Primrose later.
Then in 1942 when Christian, the eldest, was fifteen and Alexander was little more than a baby, the first Mrs Aysgarth died and my Mr Archdeacon became entangled with the appalling creature who was to become his second wife. She was a society girl, famed for her eccentricities. Everyone declared that no woman could have been less suitable for a clergyman, but Aysgarth, bold as ever, ignored this judgement and lured his femme fatale to the altar soon after the end of the war. Everyone then proclaimed that the marriage would never last and he would be ruined, but ‘everyone’, for once, was wrong.
A year after the marriage came the vital meeting with my family. ‘All clergymen with balls should be encouraged!’ pronounced my father, and proceeded to throw his weight about at Westminster in an effort to win preferment for his new friend. Having devoted many years of his life to politics in the House of Lords my father was not without influence, and the Church of England, under the control of the Crown, was always vulnerable to the meddling of the Crown’s servants in the Lords and Commons. Usually the Church succeeded in going its own way without too much trouble, but although on ecclesiastical matters the Prime Minister took care to listen to the leading churchmen, he was not obliged to act on their advice. This situation occasionally reduced eminent clerics to apoplectic frenzy and led to chilly relations between Church and State.
Into this delicate constitutional minefield my father now charged, but fortunately it proved unnecessary for him to charge too hard because Aysgarth was well qualified for a choice promotion; he had been appointed archdeacon at an unusually early age after winning the attention of the famous Bishop Jardine who had romped around Starbridge in the 1930s. Jardine had retired before the war in order to swill port in Oxfordshire, and without a powerful benefactor a self-made man such as Aysgarth might well have languished in the provinces for the rest of his career, but he did have an excellent curriculum vitae and my father did have the urge to play God. In consequence Aysgarth’s transfer to London, where his talents could be fully displayed to the people who mattered, was hardly a big surprise.
‘If you’re an agnostic,’ I said to my father at one stage of his campaign, ‘why are you getting so mixed up with the Church?’
‘The Church of England,’ said my father grandly, ‘belongs to all Englishmen, even unbelievers. It’s a national institution which for moral reasons deserves to be encouraged, and never forget, Venetia, that although I’m an agnostic and even, in moments of despair, an atheist, I remain always an exceedingly moral man. This means, inter alia, that I consider it my absolute moral duty to ensure that the Church is run by the very best men available.’
‘So it’s all right for me to be interested in the Church, is it?’
‘Yes, but never forget that the existence of God can’t be scientifically proved.’
‘Can the non-existence of God be scientifically proved?’ I enquired with interest, but my father merely told me to run away and play.
Aysgarth was still too young to be considered for a bishopric or a deanery, and when it was agreed by the Church authorities that a little London grooming was necessary in order to eliminate all trace of his modest background, a benign Prime Minister offered him a canonry at Westminster Abbey – although not the canonry attached to St Margaret’s church where so many society weddings took place. (This disappointed my mother, who was busy marrying off her eldest daughter at the time.) The canon’s house in Little Cloister had been badly damaged by a bomb during the war, but by 1946 it had been repaired and soon Aysgarth’s frightful second wife had turned the place into a nouveau-riche imitation of a mansion in Mayfair.
I must name this woman. She had been christened Diana Dorothea but her acquaintances, even my father who shied away from Christian names, all referred to her as Dido despite the fact that they might be socially obliged to address her as ‘Mrs Aysgarth’. She was small, slim and smart; she dressed in a bold, striking style. Numerous falls from horses (the result of a mania for hunting) had bashed her face about so that she was ugly, but possibly she would have been ugly anyway. She always said exactly what she thought, a habit which regularly left a trail of devastation in her wake, and her wit – overrated, in my opinion – was as famous as her tactlessness. ‘Dido can always make me laugh,’ said my Mr Dean – my Canon, as he had now become. He was amazingly patient with her, always serene even when she was crashing around being monstrous, and his reward was her undisguised adoration. ‘Of course I could have married anyone,’ she declared carelessly once, ‘so wasn’t it too, too sweet of God to keep me single until I’d met darling Stephen?’
‘Is any further proof needed,’ muttered Primrose, ‘to demonstrate that God moves in mysterious ways?’
Primrose hated her stepmother.
‘Really, Primrose …’ Those syllables always heralded some intolerable remark. ‘Really, Primrose, I can’t understand why you don’t invest in some padded bras. I certainly would if I was unfortunate enough to have your figure …’ ‘Really, Primrose, we must do something about your clothes! No wonder no man asks you out when you look like someone from a DP camp …’ ‘Really, Primrose, you must try not to be so possessive with your father – possessiveness, I’ve always thought, is inevitably the product of a low, limited little nature …’
‘If she were my stepmother,’ I said to Primrose after witnessing one of these verbal assaults, ‘I’d murder her.’
‘Only the thought of the gallows deters me,’ said Primrose, but in fact it was her love for her father that drove her to endure Dido.
Aysgarth wound up fathering five children in his second marriage, but three died either before or shortly after birth and only a boy and a girl survived. Elizabeth was a little monster, just like her mother, but Philip was placid and gentle with an affectionate nature. Not even Primrose could object to little Pip, but she had a very jaundiced opinion of Elizabeth who would scramble up on to her father’s knees, fling her arms around his neck and demand his attention at every opportunity. Aysgarth complicated the situation by being far too indulgent with her, but Aysgarth was incapable of being anything but indulgent with little girls.
My father had naively thought that once Aysgarth was ensconced in the vital Westminster canonry peace would reign until the inevitable major preferment materialised, but before long Aysgarth’s reckless streak got the better of him and he was again taking scandalous risks. Having run a large archdeaconry he quickly became bored with his canonry, and as soon as he had mastered the intricacies of Abbey politics he decided to seek new worlds to conquer in his spare time. He then got mixed up with Bishop Bell of Chichester, a remarkable but controversial celebrity who was always tinkering with international brotherhood and ecumenism and other idealistic notions which the more earthbound politicians at Westminster dubbed ‘hogwash’. The most dangerous fact about Bishop Bell, however, was not that he peddled hogwash from the episcopal bench in the House of Lords, but that he was loathed by Mr Churchill, and as the Labour Government tottered in slow motion towards defeat, it became increasingly obvious that Mr Churchill would again become Prime Minister.
‘Think of your future, Aysgarth!’ implored my father. ‘It’s death to get on the wrong side of these politicians!’
‘Then I must die!’ said Aysgarth cheerfully. ‘I refuse to be an ecclesiastical poodle.’
‘But if you want to be a bishop or a dean –’
‘All I want is to serve God. Nothing else matters.’
My father groaned and buried his face in his hands.
‘What’s the difference between a bishop and a dean?’ I demanded, taking advantage of his speechlessness to plunge into the conversation, and Aysgarth answered: ‘A dean is the man in charge of a cathedral. A bishop is the man in charge of a diocese, which is like a county – a large area which contains in addition to the cathedral a number of churches all with their own parishes. A bishop has a special throne, his cathedra, in the cathedral and sometimes he goes there to worship, but often he’s looking after his flock by attending services all over the diocese.’
‘It’s as if the bishop’s the chairman of the board of a group of companies,’ said my father morosely, ‘and the dean is the managing director of the largest company. Aysgarth, how I wish you’d never got involved with that POW camp on Starbury Plain during the war! I can quite see how useful you are to Bell when he needs someone to liaise with the German churches, but if you want to avoid antagonising Churchill you’ve got no choice: you must wash your hands of all those damned Huns without delay.’
‘I’m a disciple of Jesus Christ, not Pontius Pilate!’ said Aysgarth laughing. ‘Don’t talk to me of washing hands!’ And when my father finally laughed too, I thought what a hero Aysgarth was, unintimidated by my formidable father, unintimidated by the even more formidable Mr Churchill, and determined, like the star of a Hollywood western, to stand up for what he believed to be right.
However, real life is far less predictable than a Hollywood western, and contrary to what my father had supposed, Aysgarth’s work with the Germans failed to result in a lethal confrontation with Mr Churchill as the clock struck high noon. Bishop Bell was undergoing that metamorphosis which time so often works on people once judged controversial, and in the 1950s he became so hallowed that any hand-picked confederate of his could hardly fail to acquire a sheen of distinction. With Bell’s patronage Aysgarth became renowned as an expert on Anglo-German church relations. He formed the Anglo-German Churchmen’s Society; he raised funds to enable German refugees in England to train for the priesthood; he kept in touch with the numerous German POWs to whom he had once ministered in the Starbridge diocese. Like Bell, Aysgarth had been uncompromisingly opposed to Nazism, but he saw his post-war work with the Germans as a chance to exercise a Christian ministry of reconciliation, and in the end it was this ministry, not his canonry at Westminster, which in the eyes of the senior churchmen made him very much more than just a youthful ex-archdeacon from the provinces.
‘It was a terrible risk to mess around with all those damned Huns,’ said my father, ‘but he’s got away with it.’ And indeed Aysgarth’s failure, once he turned fifty, to receive his big preferment lay not in the fact that he had aligned himself with the pro-German Bishop Bell; it lay in the fact that he had a disastrous wife.
Dido prided herself on being a successful hostess. Her dinner-parties were patronised by an astonishing range of distinguished guests who enjoyed her eccentric remarks, but clerical wives are hardly supposed to toss off letters to the newspapers on controversial issues or make withering remarks about the Mothers’ Union during an interview with a women’s magazine. The press were rapidly enthralled with appalling results. Dido stopped giving interviews but could seldom resist a tart comment on any matter of public interest. (‘What do you think of the conquest of Everest, Mrs Aysgarth?’ Thank God someone’s finally done it – I’m bored to death with the wretched molehill!’ ‘Do you believe in capital punishment, Mrs Aysgarth?’ ‘Certainly! Flog ’em and hang ’em – and why not crucify ’em too? What was good enough for Our Lord ought to be good enough for mass-murderers!’ ‘What do you think of the Suez crisis, Mrs Aysgarth?’ ‘The Archbishop of Canterbury should declare that the entire disaster is a Moslem plot to humiliate a Christian country, and all the soldiers going to the Canal should wear crosses, like the Crusaders!’)
‘Aysgarth will never receive preferment now,’ said my father in deepest gloom after the Suez comment had been plastered over William Hickey’s Diary in the Daily Express. ‘How could that woman ever be a bishop’s wife? She’d outrage everyone in no time.’
Hating to abandon hope I said: ‘Could he still be a dean?’
‘Perhaps in one of the minor cathedrals a long way from London.’
‘Dido will never leave London except for Canterbury or York,’ said my mother dryly, but she was wrong. Late in 1956 after the Suez crisis had reached its catastrophic conclusion, Dido gave birth to her fifth and final child, a stillborn boy, and promptly lapsed into a nervous breakdown. From time to time in the past she had suffered from nervous exhaustion, but this episode was so severe that she was completely disabled. She had to spend a month in an establishment which was tactfully referred to as a convalescent home, and even when she emerged she could do no more than lie in bed in a darkened room.
‘I think she fancies herself as Camille,’ said Primrose. ‘I’m just waiting for the first little consumptive cough.’
‘Maybe she’ll commit suicide,’ I suggested.
‘Not a hope. That sort never does. Too damn selfish.’
The day after this conversation Aysgarth turned up on the doorstep of our London home in Lord North Street, a stone’s throw from Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament. My mother was out at a charity coffee-party, my father was downstairs in his study and I was lolling on the sofa in the first-floor drawing-room as I reread Middlemarch. By this time I was almost twenty and had recently returned with relief to England after enduring weeks of exile with family friends in Florence.
When I heard the doorbell I laid aside my book and padded out on to the landing. In the hall below me the butler had just opened the front door and Aysgarth was saying: ‘Lord Flaxton’s expecting me,’ but from the tone of his voice I realised I should abstain from cascading down the stairs to offer him an exuberant welcome. I paused, keeping well back from the banisters. Then as soon as the hall was empty I sped noiselessly down the staircase and pressed my ear to the door of my father’s study.
‘… and since you’ve always taken such an interest in my career,’ I heard Aysgarth say, ‘I thought you should be the first to know that I have to leave London. There’s no choice. Dido’s health demands it.’
My father at once became apoplectic with horror. I too was horrified but I did rouse myself sufficiently to check that my eavesdropping was unobserved. Fortunately a gossipy drone rising from the basement indicated that the servants had paused for elevenses. With confidence I returned my ear to the panel.
‘… and now that I’ve spoken to the psychiatrist,’ Aysgarth was saying, ‘I can clearly see that she needs to make a completely fresh start somewhere else. The tragedy is that back in 1946 she so desperately wanted to come to London because she felt that here she could play a major part in advancing my career. The present situation – and of course we all know my career’s ground to a halt – is very hard for her to bear.’
‘Quite. But nonetheless –’
‘The death of the baby was the last straw. Dido now feels she’s a failure at everything she undertakes in this city, and she’s convinced that she has no chance of happiness until she leaves it.’
‘But Aysgarth,’ said my father, trying to mask his despair by assuming a truly phenomenal gentleness, ‘that’s all very well for Dido, but what about you?’
‘I couldn’t live with myself unless I’d done everything in my power to make Dido feel successful and happy.’
There was a silence while my father and I boggled at this extraordinary statement. I was too young then to feel anything but a massive outrage that he should be acquiescing without complaint in the wrecking of his career, and it was only years later that I realised this was my first glimpse of the mystery which lay at the heart of his marriage.
‘It’s clear to me that I’m not meant to move any further up the ecclesiastical ladder,’ said Aysgarth at last when my father remained silent, ‘and I accept that. I confess I’d be happy to stay on in London and devote myself to my German interests, but obviously it’s time for my life to take a new turn.’
My father managed to say in a voice devoid of emotion: ‘I’ll see what I can do about a Crown appointment.’
‘That’s more than good of you, but quite honestly I think you’d be wasting your time if you tried to pull strings in Downing Street. I’m sure I must have the letters “W.I.” against my name in the clerical files.’
‘“W.I.”?’
‘“Wife Impossible”.’
‘Ah.’ There was a pause. Obviously my father was so appalled that he needed several seconds to frame his next question. It was: ‘Surely Bell can do something for you?’
‘Unfortunately no canonry’s likely to fall vacant at Chichester at the moment, and apart from Chichester Bell’s influence is mostly abroad – which is no use to me, since Dido couldn’t possibly cope with the stress of living in a foreign country. I’ll talk to Bell, of course, but –’
‘If he can’t produce anything suitable, Aysgarth, I believe your best bet would be to go straight to the top and talk to the Archbishop of Canterbury.’
‘He’s been implacably opposed to Dido ever since she criticised the hat Mrs Fisher wore at the Coronation.’
‘Oh God, I’d forgotten that disaster! All right, pass over Fisher. What about the Bishop of London?’
‘He’s fairly new and I still don’t know him well.’
‘In that case you must approach his predecessor. Dr Wand’s not dead yet, is he?’
‘No, but I have a fatal knack of alienating Anglo-Catholics.’
‘Then your Dean at Westminster –’
‘He’s been cool towards me for some time. I’ve been paying too much attention to my international concerns and not giving enough time to the Abbey.’
‘But there must be someone who can rescue you!’ said my father outraged. ‘I thought Christians were supposed to be famous for their brotherly love!’
Aysgarth somehow produced a laugh but before he could reply my father said suddenly: ‘What about your old diocese? Can you approach the Bishop of Starbridge?’
‘He’s another man I don’t know well. You’re forgetting that I left Starbridge before he was appointed.’
‘But I know him,’ said my father, who was one of the largest landowners in the Starbridge diocese. ‘He’s a dry old stick but we’re on good terms. Just you leave this to me, Aysgarth, and I’ll see what I can do …
IV
Neither my father nor Aysgarth hoped for more than a canonry, and both of them were aware how unlikely it was that any choice position would fall vacant at the right moment, but within twenty-four hours of their secret conference the Dean of Starbridge suffered a stroke and it was clear he would be obliged to retire. At once my father plunged into action. The deanery was a Crown appointment, but my father, undeterred by the thought of those hideous letters ‘W.I.’ in Aysgarth’s file, started swamping the Prime Minister’s clerical advisers with claret at the Athenaeum. He was helped by having an eligible candidate to promote: Aysgarth knew Starbridge well from his years as Archdeacon, and as a first-class administrator he was more than capable of running one of the greatest cathedrals in England. My father beavered away optimistically only to be appalled when the Prime Minister admitted to him during a chance encounter at the Palace of Westminster that since the deanery was such an important appointment he intended to let Archbishop Fisher have the last word.
‘Oh my God!’ I said in despair when my father broke the news. By this time I had insinuated myself into the crisis so successfully that my father was taking the unprecedented step of treating me as his confidante. ‘Mrs Fisher’s Coronation hat!’
‘If Aysgarth fails to get that deanery,’ said my father, ‘just because Dido made a catty remark about a hat –’
‘We can’t let it happen, Papa, we simply can’t – Fisher must be tamed.’ It was now 1957 and the entire summer stretched before us. ‘Is he interested in racing?’ I demanded feverishly. ‘We could offer him our box at Ascot. Or what about tennis? We could offer him our debenture seats for the Wimbledon fortnight. Or cricket – you could invite him to the Pavilion at Lords –’
‘My dear girl, Fisher’s hardly the man to be swayed by mere frivolities!’
‘Then what’s his ruling passion in life?’
‘Canon law.’
The problem seemed insuperable.
After a pause during which we racked our brains for inspiration I asked: ‘Who, technically, has the power to overrule the Archbishop of Canterbury?’
‘The Queen and God. I mean, the Queen. I really can’t start believing in God at my age –’
‘Never mind God, let’s concentrate on the Queen. Why don’t you pull a string at the Palace?’
‘What string? I don’t have a string – you know very well that I’ve never been the courtier type!’
‘Now look here, Papa: are you a peer of the realm or aren’t you?’
‘I’m beginning to feel like the inhabitant of a lunatic asylum. Venetia, the Queen would only refer the matter back to the Prime Minister, and since we already know Macmillan’s determined to pass the buck to Fisher –’
‘Then we’ve just got to conquer that Archbishop. Let’s think again. He’s an ex-headmaster, isn’t he? If you were to invite him to dinner with the headmaster of Eton and throw in the Bishop of Starbridge for good measure –’
‘This has all come to pass because back in 1945 Aysgarth married that bloody woman!’ exclaimed my father, finally giving way to his rage. ‘Why on earth did he marry her? That’s what I’d like to know! Why on earth did he do it?’
It was a question I was to ask myself many times in the years to come.
V
Our fevered plotting resulted in my father’s decision to give a little all-male dinner-party at the House of Lords. This made me very cross as I had planned to charm the Archbishop by begging him to tell me all about his life as headmaster of Repton, but my father merely said: ‘Women should keep out of this sort of business. Why don’t you start training for a decent job instead of loafing around smoking those disgusting cigarettes and reading George Eliot? If you’d gone up to Oxford –’
‘What good’s Oxford to me when all public school Englishmen run fifty miles from any woman who’s mad enough to disclose she has a brain bigger than a pea?’
‘There’s more to life than the opposite sex!’
‘It’s easy for you to say that – you’re tottering towards your sixty-sixth birthday!’
‘Tottering? I never totter – how dare you accuse me of senility!’
‘If you can spend your time making monstrous statements, why shouldn’t I follow your example?’
My father and I had this kind of row with monotonous regularity; I had long since discovered that this was an infallible way of gaining his attention. The rows had now become stylised. After the ritual door-slamming my long-suffering mother was permitted to play the peacemaker and bring us together again.
However on this occasion events failed to follow their usual course because before my mother could intervene my father took the unprecedented step of initiating the reconciliation. He did it by pretending the row had never happened. When I returned to the house after a furious walk around St James’s Park he immediately surged out of his study to waylay me.
‘Guess what’s happened!’
‘The Archbishop’s dropped dead.’
‘My God, that’s close! But no, unfortunately the dead man’s not Fisher. It’s the Bishop of Starbridge.’
I was appalled. ‘Our best ally!’
‘Our only hope! I feel ready to cut my throat.’
‘Well, pass me the razor when you’ve finished with it.’
We decided we had to be fortified by sherry. My mother was out, attending a meeting of the WVS. In the distance Big Ben was striking noon.
‘What the devil do I do now?’ said my father as we subsided with our glasses on the drawing-room sofa. ‘I can’t face Fisher without Staro on hand to make his speech about how well Aysgarth ran the archdeaconry back in the ’forties. In Fisher’s eyes I’m just a non-church-goer. I was absolutely relying on Staro to wheel on the big ecclesiastical guns.’
‘Personally,’ I said, ‘I think it’s time God intervened.’
‘Don’t talk to me of God! What a bungler He is – if He exists – collecting Staro at exactly the wrong moment! If Aysgarth ever gets that deanery now it’ll be nothing short of a miracle, and since I don’t believe in miracles and since I strongly suspect that God is an anthropomorphic fantasy conjured up by mankind’s imagination –’
The doorbell rang.
‘Damn it,’ muttered my father. ‘Why didn’t I tell Pond I wasn’t at home to callers?’
We waited. Eventually the butler plodded upstairs to announce: ‘Canon Aysgarth’s here, my Lord.’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake show him up!’ said my father crossly. ‘You know I’m always at home to Mr Aysgarth!’
Pond retired. My father was just pouring some sherry into a third glass when Aysgarth walked into the room.
‘Sit down, my dear fellow,’ said my father, ‘and have a drink. I assume you’ve heard the disastrous news.’
‘Abandon your sherry!’ said Aysgarth. ‘Send for the champagne!’
We gaped at him. His eyes sparkled. His smile was radiant. He was euphoric.
In amazement my father exclaimed: ‘What on earth’s happened?’
‘Fisher summoned me to Lambeth Palace this morning. He said: “Let’s forget all the nonsense those women stirred up. We can’t let the Church suffer in 1957 just because my wife wore a certain hat in 1953.”’
My father and I both gasped but Aysgarth, now speaking very rapidly, gave us no chance to interrupt him. ‘“Starbridge is suddenly without either a bishop or a dean,” said Fisher, “and both the Cathedral and the diocese have problems which need solving urgently by the best men available –“‘
‘My God!’ said my father.
‘My God!’ said my voice at exactly the same moment. I had a vague picture of an anthropomorphic deity smiling smugly in a nest of clouds.
‘He offered me the deanery,’ said Aysgarth. ‘By that time, of course, I was almost unconscious with amazement, but I did somehow manage to open my mouth and say “thank you”.’
For a moment my father was silent, and when he was finally able to speak he could produce only a Latin tag. It was an emotional: ‘Fiat justitia!’
Aysgarth tried to reply and failed. Mutely they shook hands. Englishmen really are extraordinary in their ruthless pursuit of the stiff upper lip. If those men had belonged to any other race they would no doubt have slobbered happily over each other for some time.
‘Venetia,’ said my father at last, somehow achieving a casual tone, ‘ring the bell and we’ll ask Pond to conjure up the Veuve Clicquot.’
But I ignored him. Taking advantage of the fact that women were permitted to be demonstrative in exceptional circumstances, I exclaimed to Aysgarth for the first time in my life: ‘My darling Mr Dean!’ and impulsively slipped my arms around his neck to give him a kiss.
‘Really, Venetia!’ said my father annoyed. ‘Young women can’t run around giving unsolicited hugs to clergymen! What a way to behave!’
But my Mr Dean said: ‘If there were more unsolicited hugs in the world a clergyman’s lot would be a happier one!’ And to me he added simply, ‘Thank you, Venetia. God bless you.’
In ecstasy I rang the bell for champagne.
TWO (#u1a2015f4-5a4f-576d-b3e6-9f4b56d41963)
‘We need to be accepted as persons, as whole persons, for our own sake.’
JOHN A. T. ROBINSON
Suffragan Bishop of Woolwich 1959–1969
Writing about Honest to God in the Sunday Mirror, 7th April 1963
I
Aysgarth drank quite a bit. Not quite a lot. But quite a bit. There’s a difference. ‘Quite a lot’ means serious drinking twice a day. ‘Quite a bit’ means serious drinking occasionally and moderate drinking in between. Aysgarth was apparently the kind of drinker who seldom touched alcohol during the day but who regularly had a couple of whiskies at six o’clock. If he went to a dinner-party later he would then drink a glass of sherry before the meal, a couple of glasses of wine with the food and a hefty measure of port once the cloth was drawn. This was by no means considered a remarkable consumption in the political circles in which my father moved, and probably the upper reaches of London ecclesiastical society also regarded such drinking habits as far from excessive, yet by 1957 my father was afraid a rumour might circulate that Aysgarth was a secret drinker.
‘He keeps his bottle of whisky behind the Oxford Dictionary in his study!’ my father said scandalised to my mother after this eccentricity had been innocently revealed to him. ‘What a risk to take! He’s paying lip-service, of course, to the tradition that clergymen shouldn’t indulge in spirits, but what are the servants going to think when they discover the clandestine bottle? He’d do better to keep it openly on the sideboard!’
‘Since Mr Aysgarth hasn’t had a lifetime’s experience of dealing with servants,’ said my mother delicately, ‘perhaps he thinks they won’t find out about the bottle.’
‘I disillusioned him, I assure you, but he didn’t turn a hair. “I’m not a drunk and my conscience is clear!” he declared, not believing a word I said, and he even had the nerve to add: “‘Honi soit qui mal y pense’!” He’s quite incorrigible.’
My father also disapproved of Aysgarth’s occasional trick of drinking too fast. On that day in 1957 as we celebrated the offer of the Starbridge deanery, he downed three glasses of champagne in a series of thirsty gulps and sighed as if longing for more. It was not offered to him. ‘Fancy drinking champagne like that!’ said my father shocked to me afterwards. ‘No breeding, of course. Not brought up to drink champagne properly.’
I opened my mouth to remind him of his blue-blooded friends who regularly consumed champagne as if it were lemonade, but then I decided not to argue. I was in too good a mood. Instead I merely proffered the opinion that Aysgarth was more than entitled to a quick swill after enduring his wife’s nervous breakdown and the agonising worry over his future.
I was still savouring my relief that the crisis had ended when I learnt that a new cloud had dawned on the ecclesiastical horizon. Calling on us the next day Aysgarth confessed his fear that an old adversary of his might be appointed bishop of Starbridge.
It was six o’clock. (Aysgarth always timed his visits to coincide with the possibility of refreshment.) My mother was attending a committee meeting of the Royal Society of Rose-Growers. Once again my father and I joined forces to support our harassed cleric.
‘Have a whisky, my dear fellow,’ said my father kindly. ‘We’ll pretend you’re not wearing your clerical collar and can drink spirits with a clear conscience. Who’s this monster who might be offered the bishopric?’
‘Oh, he’s no monster!’ said Aysgarth hastily, sinking into the nearest armchair as my father added soda-water to a shot of scotch. ‘He’s just someone I’d be happy never to meet again.’ ‘Your sworn enemy!’ I said, reading between the Christian lines.
‘Don’t be facetious, Venetia,’ said my father. ‘This is serious. Do you have no power of veto, Aysgarth? Surely the Dean and Chapter are always consulted about the appointment of a new bishop?’
‘Unofficially, yes, but officially we have to take the card we’re dealt – and bearing in mind the fact that I’ve only just won the deanery by the skin of my teeth I’m hardly in a position to raise even an informal objection to this man.’
‘But who on earth is he, for God’s sake?’
‘The rumour bouncing off the walls of Church House,’ said Aysgarth after a huge gulp of whisky, ‘is that Charles Ashworth’s been approached for the job.’
‘Oh, him! In that case you’ve nothing to worry about. He’ll never take it.’
‘I know he’s already turned down two bishoprics, but this could be the one bishopric he’s unable to refuse. He’d rank alongside the bishops of London, Durham and Winchester – there’d be a seat available immediately in the House of Lords – he’d be only ninety minutes by train from the centres of power in the capital – and as if all these advantages weren’t sufficient to seduce him, he’d have the challenge of pulling the Theological College together, and he’s an expert on theological education.’
‘I’ve never heard of this man,’ I said. ‘Where’s he been hiding himself? What’s he like?’
‘Oh, he’s the most charming fellow!’ said my father with enthusiasm. ‘Very keen on cricket. A first-class brain. And he’s got a nice little wife too, really a very nice little wife, one of those little women who listen so beautifully that they always make a man feel ten feet tall –’
‘The Reverend Dr Charles Ashworth,’ said Aysgarth, ignoring this sentimental drivel as he responded to my demand for information, ‘is Lyttelton Professor of Divinity at Cambridge and a Canon of Cambridge Cathedral.’
‘So what’s wrong with him?’
‘Nothing. We’re just temperamentally incompatible and theologically in different camps.’
‘Maybe he’ll turn down the job after all!’ I said brightly after we had all observed a moment of heavy silence. ‘Why did he turn down the previous bishoprics?’
My father commented: ‘Being a bishop isn’t every clergyman’s idea of heaven,’ and Aysgarth said: ‘Ashworth preferred life in his academic ivory tower.’ However as soon as this statement had been made he modified it by adding rapidly: ‘No, I shouldn’t say that. Ashworth came down from his ivory tower in ‘thirty-nine when he volunteered to be an army chaplain. That was something I never did. Then he was a prisoner of war for three years. I never had to endure that either. After the war he did return to academic life but not, I’m sure, because he wanted to escape from the world. He must have felt genuinely called to resume his career of writing and teaching, and I’m sure this call is why he’s turned down the previous bishoprics.’
‘So why should his call now change?’
‘Because the offer’s alluring enough to make him wonder if God might have other plans for him.’
‘Let’s get this quite straight, Aysgarth,’ said my father, always anxious to eliminate God from any conversation. ‘Have you actually had a row with this man or is this just a case of polite mutual antipathy?’
‘In 1946,’ said Aysgarth, ‘we had such a row that he smashed his glass in the fireplace and stormed out of the room.’
‘Impossible!’ said my father, balking at the thought of a clergyman behaving like a Cossack. ‘Ashworth’s such a charmer! What on earth was the row about?’
‘The theology of redemption and the theology of the Incarnation.’
‘Impossible!’ said my father again. ‘Two highly intelligent men going berserk over theology—of all subjects! No, no, Aysgarth, I refuse to believe it, you must be romancing!’
‘I assure you I’m not – although to be fair to Ashworth,’ said Aysgarth with an effort, ‘I should explain that at the time he was obviously still suffering from his experiences as a POW.’
Unable to restrain my curiosity I asked: ‘What exactly do you mean when you talk about the theology of redemption and the theology of the Incarnation?’ but my father at once cried imperiously: ‘Stop!’ and held up his hand. ‘I refuse to allow theology to be discussed in my drawing-room,’ he declared. ‘I value my collection of glasses too highly. Now Aysgarth, I’m sure you’re worrying unnecessarily. Ashworth’s not going to bear you a grudge just because you once drove him to behave like a hooligan during some bizarre tiff, and besides, you’re now both such distinguished Christian gentlemen! If you do indeed wind up living in the same cathedral close, then of course you’ll both have no trouble drawing a veil over the past and being civil to each other.’
‘Of course,’ said Aysgarth blandly, but he downed the rest of his scotch as if he still needed to drown his dread.
II
The appointments were eventually announced within a week of each other in The Times. Ashworth did accept the bishopric, although it was whispered on the Athenaeum’s grapevine that he nearly expired with the strain of making up his mind.
‘I think I must now give a little men-only dinner-party for him and Aysgarth at the House of Lords,’ said my father busily to my mother. ‘It might be helpful in breaking the ice if they met again in a plain, simple setting without a crucifix in sight.’
‘Anything less plain and simple than that baroque bastion of privilege would be hard to imagine,’ I said, furious at this new attempt to relegate me to the side-lines, ‘and why do you always want to exclude women from your dinner-parties?’
‘Don’t speak to your father in that tone of voice, please, Venetia,’ said my mother casually without pausing to glance aside from the flowers she was arranging. ‘Ranulph, you needn’t be afraid to hold the dinner-party here; Dido won’t come. When I telephoned yesterday to enquire how she was, her companion said she was still accepting no invitations.’
‘And besides,’ I said, turning over a page of Punch, ‘if you stick to your misogynist principles, you won’t be able to ogle that “nice little wife” of Professor Ashworth’s at the dinner-party.’
‘Nice little wife?’ echoed my mother, sufficiently startled to forget her flower arrangement and face us. ‘Well, I’ve only met her a couple of times at dinner-parties, but I thought she was tough as nails, the sort of chairwoman who would say to her committee: “I’m so glad we’re all in agreement,” and then effortlessly impose her views on the dissenting majority!’
‘For God’s sake let’s have both Ashworths to dinner as soon as possible,’ I said, tossing Punch aside. ‘I can’t wait.’
The dinner took place a fortnight later.
III
My mother invited Primrose to accompany her father to the dinner-party, and she also extended an invitation to Aysgarth’s third son, James, who was stationed with his regiment in London. Any young man in the Guards who can look dashing on horseback in a glamorous uniform will always be popular with mothers of unmarried daughters, but twenty-four-year-old males with the cultural limitations of a mollusc have never struck me as being in the least amusing.
‘I wish you’d invited Christian and Norman as well as James,’ I grumbled, but my mother said she had to avoid swamping the Ashworths with Aysgarths. The Ashworths did have two teenage sons but at the time of the dinner-party Charley was doing his National Service and Michael was away at school.
I regretted being deprived of Christian; like every girl I knew I had gone through a phase of being madly in love with Aysgarth’s eldest son, and although I had by this time recovered from my secret and wholly unreciprocated passion for this masculine phenomenon who looked like a film star and talked like a genius, a secret hankering for him lingered on.
Meanwhile, as I hankered in vain for Christian’s presence at the dinner-party, my mother was obliged to add to the guest-list my brother Harold, an amiable nonentity, and his wife Amanda, an expensive clothes-horse. They were in London on holiday but would eventually return to Turkey where Harold had a job shuffling papers at the British Embassy and the clothes-horse fulfilled her vocation to be ornamental. Their combined IQ was low enough to lay a pall over any dinner-party, and to make matters worse my other brother – the one who on his good days could be described as no genius but no fool – had to speak in an important debate, a commitment which excluded him from the guest-list. Oliver, the Member of Parliament for Flaxfield, was also married to an expensive clothes-horse, but unlike Harold’s ornament, this one had reproduced. She had two small boys who made a lot of noise and occasionally smelled. My three sisters, all of whom had manufactured quiet, dull, odourless daughters, were united in being very catty about Oliver’s lively sons.
My eldest sister, Henrietta, lived in Wiltshire; she had married a wealthy landowner and life was all tweeds and gun-dogs interspersed with the occasional hunt ball. My second sister, Arabella, had married a wealthy industrialist and now divided her time between London, Rome and her villa at Juan-les-Pins. My third sister, Sylvia, had been unable to marry anyone wealthy, but fortunately her husband was clever at earning a living on the Stock Exchange so they lived in a chic mews house in Chelsea where Sylvia read glossy magazines and tended her plants and told the au pair how to bring up the baby. My mother disapproved of the fact that Sylvia did no charity work. Henrietta toiled ceaselessly for the Red Cross and even Arabella gave charity balls for UNICEF whenever she could remember which country she was living in, but Sylvia, dreaming away among her plants, was too shy to do more than donate clothes to the local church.
I was mildly fond of Sylvia. She was the sister closest to me in age, but since we were so different there had been no jealousy, no fights. Having nothing in common we had inevitably drifted apart after her marriage, but whenever I felt life was intolerable I would head for her mews and sob on her sofa. Sylvia would ply me with instant coffee and chocolate digestive biscuits – an unimaginative response, perhaps, but there are worse ways of showing affection.
All my sisters were good-looking and Arabella was sexy. Henrietta could have been sexy but was too busy falling in love with gun-dogs to bother. Sylvia could have been sexy too but her husband liked her to look demurely chaste so she did. They all spoke in sporano voices with the affected upper-class accent which in those days was beginning to die out. I was a contralto and I had taken care to speak with a standard BBC accent ever since I had been teased by the middle-class fiends at my vile country preparatory school for ‘speaking la-di-da’. My sisters had escaped this experience. They had attended an upper-class establishment in London before being shovelled off to an equally upper-class boarding school, but in 1945 my parents were able to reclaim Flaxton Hall, which had been requisitioned during the war, and they were both anxious to spend time in the country while they reorganised their home. I was then eight, too old for kindergarten, too young to be shovelled off to boarding school. Daily incarceration at the hell-hole at Flaxfield, three miles from our home at Flaxton Pauncefoot, proved inevitable.
Possibly it was this torturous educational experience which set me apart from my sisters, but it seemed to me I had always been the odd one out.
‘That child gets plainer every time I see her,’ said Horrible Henrietta once to Absolutely-the-Bottom Arabella when they rolled home from Benenden for the school holidays. Those broad shoulders are almost a deformity – she’s going to wind up looking exactly like a man.’
‘Maybe she’s changing sex. That would explain the tomboyish behaviour and the gruff voice …’
‘Mama, can’t something be done about Venetia’s eyebrows? She’s beginning to look like an ape …’
‘Mama, have you ever thought of shaving Venetia’s head and giving her a wig? That frightful hair really does call for drastic measures …”
My mother, who was fundamentally a nice-natured woman whenever she wasn’t worshipping her plants, did her best to stamp on this offensive behaviour, but the attacks only surfaced in a more feline form when I reached adolescence.
‘Can’t someone encourage poor darling Venetia to take an interest in clothes? Of course I know we can’t all look like a fashion-plate in Vogue, but …’
‘Venetia, my sweet, you simply can’t wear that shade of lipstick or people will think you’re a transvestite from 1930s’ Berlin …’
Even my brothers lapsed into brutality occasionally.
‘Oliver, you’ve got to help me find a young man for Venetia –’
‘Oh God, Mama, don’t ask me!’
‘Harold, do explain to Venetia how ill-advised it is for a young girl to talk about philosophy at dinner-parties – she simply takes no notice when I tell her it’s so dreadfully showy and peculiar –’
‘Certainly, Mama. Now look here, Venetia old girl – and remember I speak purely out of fraternal affection—your average man doesn’t like clever women unless they’re real sizzlers, and since you’ll never be a real sizzler …’
‘Poor Venetia!’ said Absolutely-the-Bottom Arabella to Horrible Henrietta when she knew quite well I was within earshot. ‘No sex appeal.’
‘Well!’ said my father with a sigh of relief once his third daughter was married. ‘Now I can sit back and relax! I don’t have to worry about Venetia, do I? She’ll never be a femme fatale.’
‘… and I can’t tell you how glad I am,’ I overheard my mother confiding to her best friend, ‘that Venetia will inevitably have a quieter life than the others. When I think of all I went through with Arabella – not to mention Henrietta – and even dearest Sylvia was capable of being a little too fast occasionally …’
I remembered that remark as I dressed for dinner on the night of the Aysgarth-Ashworth reunion, and wished I could be a sizzler so fast that no one would see me for dust. I slid into my best dress, which was an interesting shade of mud, but unfortunately I had put on weight with the result that the material immediately wrinkled over my midriff when I dragged up the zip. I tried my second-best dress. The zip got stuck. My third-best dress, which had a loose-fitting waist, was wearable but hopelessly out of fashion and my fourth-best dress transformed me into a sausage again. In rage I returned to number three in the hope that I could divert attention from its unfashionable lines by swathing myself in jewellery.
‘Darling, you look like a Christmas tree!’ exclaimed my mother aghast as she glanced into the room to inspect my progress. ‘Do take off those frightful bracelets – and what on earth is Aunt Maud’s diamond hatpin doing in your hair?’
I sank down on the bed as the door closed. Then in despair I tore away all the jewellery and began to wallop my impossible hair with a brush. Eventually I heard the guests arriving, and after a long interval Harold was dispatched to drag me into the fray.
‘Come along, old girl – everyone’s thinking you must have got locked in the lavatory!’
Loathing the entire world and wishing myself a thousand miles away I followed him downstairs. The sound of animated conversation drifted towards us from the drawing-room, and as I pictured everyone looking matchlessly elegant I had to fight the urge to run screaming through the streets to Sylvia’s house in Chelsea.
‘Here she is!’ chirped idiotic Harold as I finally made my entrance.
All heads swivelled to gaze at my dead dress and diabolical hair. I had a fleeting impression of an unknown couple regarding me with mild astonishment, but just as I was wondering if it were possible to die of humiliation, my Mr Dean exclaimed warmly: ‘My dear Venetia, how very delightful you look!’ and he held out his hands to me with a smile.
IV
It was Aysgarth’s kindness which first attracted me to Christianity; the contrast between his attitude and the callous remarks of the non-believers in my family was so great that I felt the explanation could only be theological. It was small wonder that I hero-worshipped him from an early age, but I must make it clear that I was never in love with him. Such a possibility was inconceivable, first because he was a married clergyman, a creature permanently unavailable for a grand passion, and second because he was over fifty years old and therefore incapable of being classed by my youthful brain as an object of sexual desire. Moreover Aysgarth had become considerably plainer since I had first met him in 1946. By the time of the Ashworth dinner-party eleven years later his springy brown hair was smoother, straighter and a shop-soiled shade of white, while his deeply-lined face was marred by pouches under the eyes. He was also much heavier, not repulsively fat but markedly four-square. ‘Aysgarth’s built like a peasant,’ my father remarked once, not meaning to be unkind but unable to abstain from that insensitive frankness which can be such an unfortunate trait of the aristocracy.
However after Aysgarth’s heroic kindness to me at the beginning of that dinner-party, I would hardly have cared if he had been built like an elephant, and as soon as Primrose and I had the chance for a quick word I said to her enviously: ‘You’re so damned lucky to have a father like that.’
‘Isn’t he wonderful? All other men seem so dreary in comparison.’
Immediately I felt annoyed with myself for giving her the opportunity to drool; once Primrose started flaunting her Elektra complex she was nauseous. ‘Professor Ashworth doesn’t look too bad,’ I said in the hope of diverting her. ‘In fact I’d say he was rather well preserved for a man of his age.’
After my embarrassing entry into the room my mother had cursorily introduced me to the Ashworths, but afterwards the Professor had been buttonholed by Harold while Mrs Ashworth had been cornered by my fascinated father so I had had no opportunity to converse with them. I now paused to inspect the Professor with care. He was a tall man who had kept his figure; I learned later that he had excelled at games in his youth and still possessed a single-figure handicap as a golfer. Middle age had given him a receding hairline, but his curly dark hair was streaked in just the right places with just the right shade of glamorous silver. He had brown eyes, a straight nose, a firm jaw with a cleft chin, and deep lines about his strong mouth. These lines, which immediately suggested past suffering, reminded me he had once been a prisoner of war.
I opened my mouth to remark to Primrose how rare it was to encounter a handsome cleric, but at that moment we were interrupted by James, Aysgarth’s soldier son, and I was obliged to endure a lot of jolly talk about nothing. Nevertheless I kept an eye on the Professor. He was gliding around, displaying a formidable social technique as he talked to everyone in turn. From various syllables which reached my ears I gathered he was even able to talk to Harold’s clothes-horse about fashion.
Eventually Primrose was unable to resist abandoning me to move to her father’s side, jolly James decided to take a hand in passing around the canapés (our butler Pond was most put out) and I was just pretending to inspect my mother’s somewhat constipated flower arrangement when the future Bishop of Starbridge materialised at my elbow and said with such a polished charm that I even thought for a moment that he was genuinely interested in me: ‘I hear you’ve been visiting Florence. It’s a beautiful city, isn’t it?’
‘Possibly,’ I said, determined not to simper at him merely because he was one of the most distinguished churchmen in England, ‘but I don’t like Abroad.’
‘In that case I assume you’re glad to be home!’
‘Not specially, but don’t let’s waste time talking about me, Professor. I’m not a bit interesting, although it’s very kind of you to pretend that I am. Why don’t you tell me all about you?’
I had pierced the cast-iron professional charm. ‘Ah, so you’re a listener!’ he exclaimed with a seemingly genuine amusement. ‘How delightful!’
Mrs Ashworth, slender and sleek in a black dress, chose that moment to interrupt us. My first impression had been that she was much younger than her husband, but now I saw that she was probably his contemporary; her neck had that crêpe-like look which afflicts women past the menopause, but she was so immaculately made up that one barely noticed the tell-tale signs of age. Her dark hair was swept back from her forehead and drawn into a bun at the nape of her neck. Her rimless spectacles gave her a chaste, schoolmistressy look which was curiously at odds with the wicked little dress which clung to her svelte figure, and at once I decided she was far more interesting than her husband. The Professor seemed a very typical product of the best public schools and universities, but Mrs Ashworth, whom I found impossible to place against any definitive background, didn’t seem typical of anything.
She was saying lightly to her husband: ‘Vamping young girls again, darling?’
‘Indeed I am – I’ve just discovered Miss Flaxton’s a listener.’
‘Ah, a femme fatale!’ said Mrs Ashworth, regarding me with a friendly interest as I mentally reeled at her choice of phrase. ‘How clever of you, Miss Flaxton! Men adore good listeners – they have a great need to pour out their hearts regularly to sympathetic women.’
‘I do it all the time myself,’ said the Professor, effortlessly debonair. ‘Apart from golf it’s my favourite hobby.’
‘How very intriguing that sounds!’ said Aysgarth, sailing into our midst with his champagne glass clasped tightly in his hand. ‘Am I allowed to ask what this hobby is or should I preserve a discreet silence?’
There was a small but awkward pause during which I was the only one who laughed – a fact which startled me because although the remark could have been classed as risqué it could hardly have been described as offensive. Yet both Ashworths were as motionless as if Aysgarth had made some error of taste, and Aysgarth himself immediately began to behave as if he had committed a faux pas. ‘Sorry,’ he mumbled. ‘Bad joke. Silly of me.’
The Professor made a lightning recovery. ‘No, no!’ he said, smooth as glass. ‘I was merely startled because you seemed to materialise out of nowhere!’
‘Just thought I’d seize the chance for a quick word before we all go in to dinner –’
‘Of course – I was thinking only a moment ago that I’d talked to everyone in the room except you –’
‘Seems ages since we last met –’
‘Yes, it’s certainly a long time –’
‘Oxford ‘fifty-two, wasn’t it?’ said Aysgarth, having regained his equilibrium with the aid of a large swig of champagne. ‘That weekend when we were both guests of the Master of Balliol.’
‘No, you’ve seen Charles since then,’ said Mrs Ashworth. ‘We met in London when we all helped the Dean of Westminster recover from the Coronation.’
‘So we did! I’d quite forgotten … I’m sorry, I can’t quite remember – dear me, I’m beginning to sound like an amnesiac – but did I ever call you Lyle?’
‘I really have no idea,’ said Mrs Ashworth, as if such a feat of memory was well beyond her capabilities, ‘but please do in future. Did I ever call you Neville?’
‘Neville!’ I exclaimed. ‘But no one calls him Neville nowadays – he’s always Stephen!’
‘Ah,’ said Mrs Ashworth, ‘but you see, I met him before the war when Bishop Jardine appointed him Archdeacon of Starbridge. I was Mrs Jardine’s companion at the time.’
Much intrigued I said: ‘But how romantic that you should now be returning in such style to the house where you were once a mere companion!’
‘It would indeed be romantic if it were true, but the Jardines lived in the old episcopal palace which is now the Choir School, whereas Charles and I will be living – thank goodness! – in the South Canonry. I wouldn’t have wanted to return to the palace,’ said Mrs Ashworth serenely. Too many –’ She hesitated but for no more than a second ‘– poignant memories.’
Aysgarth said: ‘Do you regret the loss of the palace, Ashworth?’ but the Professor replied promptly: ‘Not in the least – and my dear fellow, if you’re going to call my wife Lyle, I really don’t see why you should now fight shy of calling me Charles! I only hope I have your permission to call you Stephen in the interesting times which I’m sure lie ahead for us all.’
Aysgarth at once became almost inarticulate with a shyness which I suspected was triggered not only by his social inferiority complex, but by his gratitude that Ashworth should be making such a marked effort to be friendly. He could only manage to say: ‘Yes. Stephen. Fine. Please do,’ and toss off the remains of his champagne.
Appearing in contrast wholly relaxed Ashworth observed: ‘It really is most remarkable that our careers should have coincided like this – in fact, if you knew how often Lyle and I have been telling ourselves recently that God moves in mysterious ways –’
‘Darling,’ said Mrs Ashworth, ‘if you quote that ghastly cliché once more I shall be tempted to strangle you with your brand-new pectoral cross.’
‘More champagne anyone?’ enquired jolly James, still playing the butler.
His father at once held out his glass. ‘“Well, I don’t mind if I do, sir!” as Colonel Chinstrap used to say on ITMA –’
‘Oh, how I adored ITMA!’ said my mother, drifting over to us and eyeing her constipated flower arrangement as if she had suddenly realised it needed a laxative. ‘Venetia, can you pass around the cigarettes? Pond seems to have disappeared in a huff for some reason …’
‘That bishop-to-be is going to look simply too heavenly in gaiters,’ Harold’s clothes-horse was drawling as she demolished her third dry martini.
‘Can someone stop young James playing the butler?’ muttered my father. ‘Pond’s taken violent umbrage.’
‘… and what I absolutely can’t understand,’ idiotic Harold was burbling in a corner, ‘is how Pater, who can’t bear going to church and has always said “Boo!” to God, has got himself mixed up with these high-powered clerical wallahs.’
‘He’ll probably wind up taking the sacrament on his deathbed,’ said Primrose, ‘like Lord Marchmain in Brideshead.’
‘Brideshead?’ said Harold. ‘Where’s that?’
‘I’m damned hungry,’ said my father to my mother. ‘Are they all dead drunk in the kitchen?’
‘Dinner is served, my Lord!’ thundered Pond reproachfully from the doorway, and with relief we all descended to the dining-room.
V
The next evening Aysgarth called at six o’clock with a note of thanks and a bunch of carnations for my mother, but found only me at home. My mother had travelled down to Flaxton Pauncefoot that morning and my father was attending a Lords’ debate on education. Harold and the clothes-horse had not yet returned from a day at the races.
When Pond showed Aysgarth into the drawing-room I was reading Professor Ashworth’s latest book, St Augustine and the Pelagian Heresy: the Origins of His Theology Concerning God’s Grace, which I had borrowed from the library. The Professor wrote in a cool, lucid prose which created an impression of scholarly detachment and yet succeeded in being surprisingly readable – but perhaps that was because he was writing of St Augustine’s fight to master his sex drive, a fight which was to have immense repercussions both for Christianity and for the bluff heretic Pelagius who had said (more or less) that man could jolly well pull himself up by his own bootstraps and conquer sin not by God’s grace but by will-power and a stiff upper lip.
Pelagius, it is hardly necessary to add, had been a Briton.
‘Oh, I’ve read that book,’ said Aysgarth as we settled down for a delectable discussion of the dinner-party. ‘I thought it very bad. Like St Augustine Charles’s twin obsessions are heresy and sex. Apparently up at Cambridge all his divinity undergraduates refer to him as Anti-Sex Ashworth.’
‘How extraordinary! He seemed quite normal.’
‘No, no – rabid against fornication and adultery. Such a mistake! In my opinion there are far worse sins than the sexual errors, and – whoops! Here’s Pond with the drinks.’
Pond deposited the sherry and whisky decanters, the soda-siphon and a suitable selection of glasses on the side-table and waited for orders, but I waved him away.
‘Help yourself, Mr Dean.’
‘Well, perhaps a little soupçon of sherry –’
‘Oh, go on – have a whisky! You don’t want to go down in history as Anti-Alcohol Aysgarth!’
‘That possibility,’ said my Mr Dean, helping himself to a modest measure of scotch, ‘is so remote that I don’t think we need consider it seriously. And I must guard my tongue about Charles, who was certainly more than civil to me last night – even though I nearly shocked him to death with my opening remark –’
‘But only a second before you arrived Mrs Ashworth had been teasing him about vamping young girls! I don’t think you shocked him at all – he was just taken aback because you slunk up behind him and –’
‘– hit him over the head with a double entendre! I must have been mad.’
‘I thought you were sensational. And so was Mrs Ashworth, making that little black dress look like a hundred-guinea model from Harrods just by wearing one piece of jewellery – and choosing rimless spectacles instead of glasses with distracting frames – and dyeing her hair so cunningly that no man would ever dream it had been touched up –’
‘Dyeing her hair? But no clergyman’s wife would ever do that!’
‘Yes, I expect that’s what the Professor thinks too whenever he’s not busy conquering everyone in sight by exuding that synthetic charm of his. But tell me: who is Mrs Ashworth? Where did she come from? And how did the two of them meet?’
‘Ah!’ said Aysgarth, settling down cosily for a gossip. ‘Now that’s quite a story …’
VI
Apparently Mrs Ashworth had grown up in a remote Norfolk parish where her great-uncle had been the vicar; her parents had died young. This clerical background had enabled her to obtain the post of companion to Bishop Jardine’s wife when Jardine himself, rocketing racily up the Church’s ladder of preferment, had been appointed Dean of Radbury in the ’twenties. Five years later in 1932 he had become the Bishop of Starbridge. In 1937, the young Charles Ashworth, already a doctor of divinity, had decided to visit Starbridge to do some research in the Cathedral Library, and since he was the protégé of Archbishop Lang he had been invited to stay at the episcopal palace. Crossing the threshold he had fallen instantly and violently in love with Mrs Jardine’s companion.
Since Mrs Jardine had been an ineffectual woman who had relied on her companion to run the palace for her, this coup de foudre had caused chaos, but Ashworth, much to the Bishop’s fury, had refused to be deflected from his romantic charge to the altar.
‘The whole trouble was,’ said Aysgarth, ‘that Lyle’s departure was a bereavement for the Jardines as well as a crippling inconvenience. They were a childless couple who’d come to regard her as a daughter, and they’d reached the stage where they couldn’t imagine life without her.’
‘Presumably they were all reconciled later?’
‘Oh yes, but back in 1937 –’
‘– the Jardine dragon had to be vanquished before St George could carry away the maiden on his shining white horse!’
‘As a matter of fact whether he was a saint and she was a maiden was hotly debated later when the two of them produced a baby only seven months after the wedding, but since the infant was very small and delicate, just as a premature baby should be, everyone eventually agreed that the maiden’s purity had been unsullied prior to her marriage.’
‘Rather tricky to be a clergyman,’ I said, ‘and produce a baby a shade too fast.’
‘Most embarrassing for poor Charles! However I never had any serious doubt that he’d behaved himself – he was always too ambitious to do anything else.’ As an afterthought he added: ‘He was married before – his first wife was killed in a car crash – but although he was a widower for some time before he met Lyle you can be sure he kept himself in order. The first thing a successful young clergyman learns to acquire, if he wants to continue as a success, is an immaculate self-control in dealing with women.’
‘At least nowadays clergymen can get married, which is more than poor St Augustine could – although actually I don’t understand why St Augustine couldn’t marry. Why did he have to be celibate?’
‘Well, in the days of the Early Church …’
We embarked on a fascinating conversation about the origins of clerical celibacy, and Aysgarth promised to lend me his copy of St Augustine’s Confessions.
‘My dear Venetia,’ he sighed at last as he finished his whisky and rose reluctantly to his feet, ‘how very much I enjoy talking to you!’
I smiled radiantly at him and felt like a sizzler.
VII
I should perhaps make it clear that contrary to the impression I may have created while describing the turning point of his career, I did not see Aysgarth often. He led a busy life at Westminster, and I was often away. After leaving boarding school I had been obliged to endure periods of exile in Switzerland and Italy, and even when I returned to England I often sneaked down to Flaxton Pauncefoot in order to escape from the ghastly London social events where I was either ignored or treated as a freak. Life drifted on. I had no idea what I wanted to do. My métier seemed to consist of sipping drinks, smoking cigarettes and reading books. There was no calling, no summons from God written in the sky in letters of fire, and increasingly often it seemed to me that my career as an adult was incapable of beginning so long as I remained condemned to the sidelines of life by my unfortunate looks and my embarrassing intellectual inclinations.
Sometimes I gave way to despair. Supposing I had to suffer the ultimate horror of not marrying? Then I would be ‘poor old Venetia’, that pathetic freak, till my dying day. The prospect was intolerable. My depression deepened. My parents found me increasingly difficult, and soon after the Aysgarth-Ashworth dinner-party they decided that something would have to be done.
It was unusual for my parents to stage a joint attack. My mother preferred to leave the bombastic behaviour to my father and take refuge in the conservatory, but on this occasion she was apparently desperate enough to decide that I was more important than her plants.
‘We just thought we’d have a little word, darling,’ she said soothingly after we had all assembled for battle in the drawing-room of our house in Lord North Street. ‘Your father’s actually quite worried about you.’
‘Worried?’ said my father, bristling with rage. ‘I’m not worried, I’m livid! I shouldn’t have to deal with a recalcitrant daughter at my age – it’s bad for my blood pressure.’
‘You should have thought of that,’ I said tartly, ‘before you frolicked around with Mama in Venice in 1936.’
‘Frolicked? What a damn silly word – makes me sound like a bloody pansy!’
‘Oh, do stop screaming at each other!’ begged my mother, fanning herself lightly with the latest edition of Homes and Gardens. ‘What happened in ‘thirty-six is quite irrelevant – except that here you are, Venetia, and we have to help you make the best of your life – which means we simply must insist that you now stop frivolling and –’
‘Frivolling?’ I mimicked. ‘What a damn silly word! Makes me sound like a bloody butterfly!’
‘Oh my God,’ said my mother, taking refuge in Homes and Gardens.
‘Just because you happen to be reading St Augustine’s Confessions’ said my father, storming into the attack, ‘you needn’t think you’re not frittering away your time – and I must say, I think Aysgarth should have asked my permission before he lent you that book. Parts of it are most unsuitable for an unmarried young woman.’
‘If you mean that incident in the public baths when Augustine was fourteen –’
‘What a lovely picture of a cyclamen!’ murmured my mother, gazing enrapt at a page of her magazine.
‘If you’d gone up to Oxford,’ said my father to me, ‘as I wanted you to, you wouldn’t be lying around sipping gin at odd hours, smoking those disgusting cigarettes and reading about fourteen-year-old boys in public baths!’
‘If I’d gone up to Oxford,’ I said, ‘I’d be studying the work of Greek pederasts, ordering champagne by the case and damn well looking at fourteen-year-old boys in public baths!’
‘Now look here, you two,’ said my mother, reluctantly tossing her magazine aside, ‘this won’t do. Ranulph, you must try not to get so upset. Venetia, you must stop talking like a divorcée in an attempt to shock him – and you must try to remember that since he watched his own father die of drink and his brother die of – well, we won’t mention what he died of – your father has an absolute horror of the havoc wealth can cause among people who lack the self-discipline to lead worthwhile, productive lives. The truth is that people like us, who are privileged, should never forget that privileges are always accompanied by responsibilities. We have a moral duty to devote our wealth and our time to worthy causes and live what the lower orders can see is a decent upright life.’
‘Hear, hear!’ bellowed my father.
‘I’m sure you think that was a dreadfully old-fashioned speech,’ pursued my mother, encouraged by this roar of approval to sound uncharacteristically forceful, ‘but believe me, it’s neither smart nor clever to be an effete member of the aristocracy. You must be occupied in some acceptable manner, and fortunately for you, since you live today and not yesterday, that means you can train for an interesting job. I do understand, I promise you, why you chose not to go up to Oxford; being a blue-stocking isn’t every woman’s dream of happiness. But since you’ve rejected an academic life you must choose some other career to pursue while you fill in your time before getting married. After all, even Arabella had a job arranging flowers in a hotel! I know she wound up in a muddle with that Italian waiter, but –’
‘I don’t want to arrange flowers in a hotel.’
‘Well, perhaps if you were to take a nice cordon bleu cookery course at Winkfield –’
‘I don’t want to take a nice cordon bleu cookery course at Winkfield.’
‘You don’t want to do anything,’ said my father. ‘It’s an absolute waste of a first-class brain. Awful. Tragic. It makes me want to –’
‘Ranulph,’ said my mother, ‘don’t undo all my good work, there’s a pet. Venetia –’
‘I think I’d like to be a clergyman.’
‘Darling, do be serious!’
‘All right, all right, I’ll take a secretarial course! At least that’ll be better than arranging bloody flowers!’
‘I can’t stand it when women swear,’ said my father. ‘Kindly curb your language this instant.’
‘You may have spent a lot of your life declaring in the name of your liberal idealism that men and woman should be treated equally,’ I said, ‘but I’ve never met a man who was so reluctant to practise what he preached! If you really believed in sexual equality you’d sit back and let me say “bloody” just as often as you do!’
‘I give up,’ said my mother. ‘I’m off to the conservatory.’
‘And I’m off to the Athenaeum,’ said my father. ‘I simply daren’t stay here and risk a stroke any longer.’
‘How typical!’ I scoffed. ‘The champion of equality once again takes refuge in an all-male club!’
‘Bloody impertinence!’ roared my father.
‘Bloody hypocrite!’ I shouted back, and stormed out, slamming the door.
VIII
If I had been living in the ’sixties I might then have left home and shared a flat with cronies; I might have taken to drink or drugs (or both) and chased after pop singers, or I might have opened a boutique or become a feminist or floated off to Nepal to find a guru. But I was living in the ’fifties, that last gasp of the era which had begun in those lost years before the war, and in those days nice young girls ‘just didn’t do that kind of thing’, as the characters in Hedda Gabler say. (Hedda Gabler was one of Aysgarth’s favourite plays; he adored that clever doomed sizzler of a heroine.)
It was also a fact that in between the acrimonious rows my life at home was much too comfortable to abandon in a fit of pique. My parents, exercising a policy of benign neglect, were usually at pains to avoid breathing down my neck, ordering me about and preaching nauseous sermons about setting an example to the lower orders. I was waited on hand and foot, well fed and well housed. In short, I had sufficient incentives to postpone a great rebellion, and besides, like Hedda Gabler, I shied away from any idea of not conforming to convention. If I flounced around being a rebel I knew I would only earn the comment: ‘Poor old Venetia – pathetic as ever!’ and wind up even worse off than I already was.
So after that row with my parents in 1957 I did not rush immediately upstairs to pack my bags. I gritted my teeth and faced what I saw as the cold hard facts of life: no longer could I sit around sipping gin, smoking cigarettes and soaking up the sexy reminiscences of St Augustine. The day of reckoning for my refusal to go up to Oxford was at hand, and just like any other (usually middle-class) girl who considered that the hobbies of flower-arranging and playing with food were far beneath her, I had to embark on a secretarial training.
However as I reflected that night on my capitulation to parental bullying, I thought I could face my reorganised future without too much grief; a secretarial course could well be my passport to what I thought of as Real Life, the world beyond my mother’s gardens and my father’s clubs, a world in which people actually lived – swilling and swearing, fighting and fornicating – instead of merely existing bloodlessly in charity committee meetings or in cloud-cuckoo-lands such as the Athenaeum and the House of Lords.
I decided to go to Mrs Hester’s Secretarial College because Primrose had attended a course there while I had been fighting off death by boredom in Switzerland and Italy. Like me, Primrose had been encouraged by her school to try for a place at Oxford, but she had convinced me that an Oxford education was the one thing we both had to avoid if we were to have any hope of experiencing Real Life in the future.
‘Christian told me frankly it would reduce my chance of marrying to nil,’ she had confided, ‘and there’s no doubt spinsters are always regarded with contempt. Besides, how on earth could I go up to Oxford and leave poor Father all alone with Dido? He’d go mad if he didn’t have me to talk to whenever she was driving him round the bend.’ Primrose had never been away from home. She had attended St Paul’s Girls School in London while I had been incarcerated at Cheltenham Ladies’ College, and I had always secretly resented the fact that her father had considered her indispensable while mine had been willing to consign me to an institution.
Although Primrose was anxious to marry eventually, just as a successful woman should, she never seemed to mind having no boyfriends. Instead she channelled her gregarious inclinations towards forming a circle of female friends whom her brothers condescendingly referred to as ‘the Gang’. Some of the Gang had been at school with her, some had been débutantes with us in 1955 and some had been her classmates at Mrs Hoster’s. Aysgarth adored us all. Dido used to refer to us as ‘Stephen’s Little Harem’ and look indulgent. ‘Name your favourite of the day!’ we would tease him as he sat beaming on the sofa and we lounged on the carpet at his feet, but he would sigh: ‘I can’t decide! It’s as if you were asking a chocolate addict to select from a row of equally luscious peppermint creams!’
When the Aysgarths moved to Starbridge in 1957, it was thought the Gang might drift apart, but Starbridge was an easy journey by train from London and the core of the Gang kept in touch. Abandoning all thought of a secretarial career in London, Primrose landed a job at the diocesan office on Eternity Street, and in order to avoid constant clashes with Dido she had her own flatlet in the Deanery’s former stables. Time ticked on. I completed my secretarial training and drifted through a series of jobs in art galleries and antique shops and publishing houses. Then with the dawn of the new decade the Gang at last began to disintegrate. Penny and Sally got married, Belinda joined the Wrens, Tootsie became an actress and was expelled from the Gang for Conduct Unbecoming, Midge dropped out to grow daffodils in the Scilly Isles, and by 1963 only I was left in ‘Stephen’s Little Harem’ – ‘The last peppermint cream left in the box!’ as my chocolate-loving Mr Dean put it so saucily, much to his wife’s annoyance.
‘You really should make more effort to get married, Venetia,’ she said soon afterwards. ‘In the game of life women who don’t marry are inevitably regarded as such amateurs, and you wouldn’t want people to look down on you pityingly, would you, my dear? That’s one thing a clever girl can never endure.’
I could have withstood that woman better if she had been merely mad and bad. But it was her talent for disembowelling her victims with the knife of truth which made her so thoroughly dangerous to know.
It was 1963. The innocent days were almost over, and in the early spring, just after John Robinson, the suffragan bishop of Woolwich, published the book which was to shake the Church of England to its foundations, the foundations of my own world were at last rocked by the earthquake of change. Exasperated by my failure to stay in any job longer than a year, my father went to great trouble to obtain a post for me at the Liberal Party’s headquarters. I handed in my notice a week later.
‘How dare you do this to me!’ shouted my father, who was now seventy-two and even less capable of managing a recalcitrant daughter.
‘My dear Papa, I’m the victim, not you! I was the one who actually had to work at that ghastly place!’
‘Well, if you think you can loaf around under my roof doing nothing for the next six months –’
‘Nothing would induce me to loaf around under your roof a day longer!’ I said, almost twenty-six years old and finally summoning the strength to burst out of my luxurious prison. ‘I’m off to Starbridge to meditate on God and contemplate Eternity – which is exactly what you ought to be doing at your age!’
And having delivered myself of this speech, which could be guaranteed to infuriate any humanist past endurance, I embarked on my journey into adventure.
THREE (#u1a2015f4-5a4f-576d-b3e6-9f4b56d41963)
‘But now “God” is news!’
JOHN A. T. ROBINSON
Suffragan Bishop of Woolwich 1959–1969
Writing about Honest to God in the Sunday Mirror, 7th April 1963
I
At Waterloo Station I encountered Charley Ashworth, the Bishop’s elder son, whom I had occasionally met in Starbridge during my visits to the Aysgarths. He was a year my junior, small, chatty and bumptious. It was generally agreed that the bumptiousness masked an inferiority complex which had arisen because he was plain while his brother Michael was handsome. After completing his National Service Charley had gone up to Cambridge, where he had taken a first in divinity, and in 1961 he had entered a theological college, also in Cambridge, to learn how to be a clergyman. This exercise, which hardly seemed compatible with his pugnacious personality, was still going on.
‘Good heavens – Venetia!’ he exclaimed, speeding towards me with a suitcase in one hand and a copy of Bishop Robinson’s Honest to God in the other. ‘What are you doing here?’ He made it sound as if I were trespassing.
‘Just admiring the view from platform twelve.’ I had set down my bags in order to rest my wrists; I never managed to travel light. Around us throbbed the echoing noise and mouldy smell of a mighty station. I had been gazing at the inert train nearby and trying to decide which end would have the best chance of offering me a solitary journey.
‘But I’d heard you were running the Liberal Party!’ Charley was protesting as I realised my hopes of solitude had been dashed.
‘I decided I wasn’t political.’
‘Good for you! Personally I think women should keep out of politics.’
‘And what do you think they should keep in?’
‘The home, of course.’ He heaved open the door of the nearest carriage and flung out his hand generously towards the interior as if he were offering a child a treat. ‘In you go!’
‘Could you deal with my bags?’ I said. ‘We girls are such delicate little flowers that we have to rely on strong brave boys like you to help us whenever we’re not sitting at home being plastic dolls.’
‘Very funny!’ said Charley good-humouredly, my sarcasm quite lost on him, and without complaint turned his attention to my bulging suitcases.
‘How are you getting on with Honest to God?’ I enquired as he tossed his book on to the seat.
‘Oh, have you heard of it?’
‘I can read, you know. OUR IMAGE OF GOD MUST GO, SAYS BISHOP –’
‘That article in the Observer was a disgrace!’
‘Did you think so? I adored it – such fun when a Church of England bishop declares to all and sundry that he doesn’t believe in God!’
‘But that’s not what Robinson’s saying at all –’
‘That’s what laymen think he’s saying.’
‘And that’s exactly why the book’s a disgrace! It’s so bad for laymen. My father says that Robinson’s being thoroughly irresponsible as well as intellectually slipshod, and I agree with him,’ said Charley, exuding outraged virtue as he heaved my bags up on to the rack. ‘My father and I always agree on everything.’ Closing the carriage door he pulled down the window and began to scan the platform.
‘Tedious for you,’ I said. ‘My father and I are in perpetual disagreement. Life’s just one long glorious row.’ But Charley, leaning out of the window, was too absorbed in some private anxiety to reply.
‘Bother the infant,’ he said at last, glancing at his watch. ‘He’s cutting it very fine.’
‘What infant’s this?’
‘I doubt if you’d know him – he’s only twenty. He’s supposed to be staying tonight with us at the South Canonry.’ Again he hung out of the window in an agony of suspense but a moment later he was bawling ‘Hey!’ in relief and wildly waving his arm.
A tall, pale youth, earnest and bespectacled, appeared at the door and was hustled into the carriage. He wore very clean jeans and a spotless blue shirt with a black leather jacket. All he was carrying was a duffle-bag. ‘Sorry I’m late,’ he said. ‘I got lost on the underground.’ Unaware that Charley and I knew each other he wasted no time looking at me but removed his glasses and began to polish them with an exquisitely ironed white handkerchief. In the distance the guard’s whistle blew and after a preliminary jerk the train began to glide out of the station.
‘Venetia,’ Charley said, remembering his manners, ‘this is Nicholas Darrow. Nick, this is the Honourable Venetia Flaxton.’
‘I find it more comfortable these days to drop the Honourable,’ I said. ‘Hullo, Nick.’
Replacing his spectacles he looked me straight in the eyes and at once I felt as if I stood in a plunging lift. ‘Hi,’ he said politely without smiling. His eyes were an unnaturally clear shade of grey.
‘Have we met before?’ said my voice. I sounded as unnerved as I felt, but I knew that the obvious explanation for my loss of poise – sexual bewitchment – was quite wrong. He was a plain young man. Yet somehow he contrived to be compulsively watchable.
‘No, we haven’t met,’ he was answering tranquilly, opening his duffle-bag and pulling out a book. It was Honest to God.
‘Nick’s father was principal of the Starbridge Theological College back in the ’forties,’ Charley said. ‘Maybe Nick’s jogging your memory of him.’
‘No, that’s impossible. I wasn’t involved in Starbridge ecclesiastical circles until the Aysgarths moved to the Deanery in ’fifty-seven.’
Charley obviously decided to dismiss my confusion as a mere feminine vagary. ‘Nick’s reading divinity up at Cambridge just as I did,’ he said, ‘and – good heavens, Nick, so you’ve bought Honest to God! What’s your verdict so far?’
‘Peculiar. Can it really be possible to reach the rank of bishop and know nothing about the English mystics?’
‘Maybe he can’t connect with them,’ I said. ‘I certainly can’t. I think Julian of Norwich’s description of Christ’s blood is absolutely revolting and borders on the pathological.’
The grave grey eyes were again turned in my direction and again I wondered why his mysterious magnetism should seem familiar.
‘Well, of course it’s very hard for a layman to approach these apparently morbid touches from the right angle,’ Charley was saying with such condescension that I wanted to slap him, ‘but if one takes the time to study the mystics with the necessary spiritual seriousness—’
‘You’re a church-goer,’ said Nick suddenly to me.
‘Now and then, yes.’
‘But you’re not a communicant.’
‘I watch occasionally.’ I was still trying to work out how he had made these deductions when Charley exclaimed in delight: ‘In college we debate about people like you! You’re from the fringes – the shadowy penumbra surrounding the hard core of church membership!’
‘I most certainly am not!’ I said, concealing my fury behind a voice of ice. ‘I’ve been christened and confirmed – I’m just as much a member of the Church of England as you are!’
‘But if you’re not a regular communicant –’
‘I’ve never been able to understand why chewing a bit of artificial bread and sipping some perfectly ghastly wine should confer the right to adopt a holier-than-thou attitude to one’s fellow-Christians.’
‘Shall I give you my best lecture on the sacraments?’ said Charley, allowing a sarcastic tone of voice to enhance his nauseous air of condescension.
‘No, read Honest to God and shut up. It’s narrow-minded, arrogant believers like you who give the Church a bad name.’
Charley flushed. His pale brown eyes seemed to blaze with golden sparks. His wide mouth hardened into a furious line. ‘If all so-called believers were a little more devout, we might have more chance of beating back sin!’
‘Who wants to beat back sin?’ I said. ‘I’m mad about it myself.’ And opening my bag I casually pulled out the famous unexpurgated Penguin edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
That closed the conversation.
The train thundered on towards Starbridge.
II
‘Sorry,’ said Charley to me an hour later. ‘I didn’t mean to offend you. Since you don’t come from a religious family, it’s very praiseworthy that you go to church at all.’
‘Oh, my father’s devoted to religion,’ I said. ‘He just has trouble believing in God.’
‘So he didn’t mind you being baptised and confirmed?’
‘Mind! He insisted on it! In his opinion all loyal English people ought to go through the initiation rites of the Church of England – it’s part of our tribal heritage, like learning about King Alfred burning the cakes and memorising the patriotic speeches from Henry V and singing “Land of Hope and Glory” at the last night of The Proms.’
‘This is most interesting, isn’t it, Nick?’ said Charley. ‘When one comes from a religious home one doesn’t realise what extraordinary attitudes flourish elsewhere.’
‘What’s so extraordinary about them?’ I said. ‘Isn’t the main purpose of our glorious Church to reassure us all that God is without doubt an Englishman?’
‘You’re teasing me!’ said Charley. But he sounded uncertain.
I suddenly became aware that Nick was gazing at me. I had intercepted his gaze more than once during our hour of silence, and as I caught him in the act yet again I demanded: ‘Why do you keep staring at me as if I’m an animal at the zoo?’
He lowered his gaze and shifted uncomfortably in his seat. ‘Sorry.’ His voice was almost inaudible. ‘It’s the aura.’
‘Nick’s a psychic,’ said Charley serenely as my jaw sagged. ‘That’s how he knew you were a church-goer but not a communicant.’
‘No, it wasn’t!’ said Nick angrily. ‘Her knowledge of Dame Julian suggested she was interested enough in Christianity to be a church-goer, and her repulsion towards the description of Christ’s blood suggested she was unlikely to take part in any symbolic ritual involving it. The deduction I made was completely rational and involved no psychic powers whatsoever!’
‘Okay, but you can’t deny you’re a psychic – think what a whizz you were at Pelmanism!’
‘Shut up, I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘I always thought it was such a shame when your father stopped you telling fortunes –’
‘Shut up, Charley!’ Jumping to his feet the youth heaved open the door into the corridor and stalked out in a rage.
‘It’s not my day, is it? said Charley with a sigh. ‘Why do I always put people’s backs up? I can’t understand it. I only want to be sociable and friendly.’
Leaving him brooding with touching innocence on his abrasive personality I prowled down the corridor to the buffet where I found Nick slumped at a table and sipping Coca-Cola. After buying some liquid which British Rail had the nerve to market as coffee I sat down opposite him.
‘Now look here,’ I said sternly, trying to take advantage of my years of seniority. ‘You’ve made a disturbing statement and I want an explanation. What’s the matter with my aura? Is it exuding gloom and doom?’
He failed to smile. He was a very serious young man. ‘No, turbulence,’ he said. ‘You must be very unhappy. You look so self-assured in your expensive clothes, and you talk so carelessly as if you hadn’t a worry in the world, but underneath you’re throbbing with pain.’
‘Supposing I were to tell you that you’re dead wrong?’
‘I don’t see how I can be. As soon as you mentioned your revulsion towards Dame Julian’s description of Christ’s blood I sensed your blood, spattered all over your psyche, and I knew you were in pain.’
I boggled but recovered. ‘Here,’ I said, shoving my hand palm upwards across the table. ‘Read that and tell me more.’
‘I don’t do that sort of thing nowadays.’ But he glanced at my palm as if he found the temptation hard to resist. ‘Anyway I’m not trained in palmistry. I just hold the hand and wait for the knowledge.’
I grabbed his fingers and intertwined them with mine. ‘Okay, talk. You owe it to me,’ I added fiercely as he still hesitated. ‘You can’t just make gruesome statements and go no further! It’s unfair and irresponsible.’
Sullenly he untwined our fingers, set my hand back on the table and placed his palm over mine. There followed a long silence during which he remained expressionless.
‘My God!’ I said, suddenly overwhelmed by fright. ‘Am I going to die?’
‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘You’re going to live.’ And for one long moment he stared at me appalled before blundering out of the buffet in confusion.
III
I caught up with him just before he reached the carriage. ‘What the hell did you see?’
‘Nothing. I just don’t like meddling with psychic emanations, that’s all, and I promised my father I wouldn’t do it. If I seem upset it’s because I’m angry that I’ve broken my word to him.’ Diving into the carriage he collapsed in a heap on the seat.
Charley, who had been dipping into my copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, hastily shoved it aside but I paid him no attention. I remained in the corridor and stared out of the window at the smooth hills of the Starbridge diocese. The train was now hurtling towards our journey’s end.
‘Nick and I are down here for Easter, of course,’ said Charley, appearing beside me as the train slowed to a crawl on the outskirts of the city. ‘Nick stayed on after the end of term to begin the swot for his exams, and I delayed my return to Starbridge in order to make a retreat with the Fordite monks in London … Are you staying with the Aysgarths or are you heading for home?’
‘The former.’ As the train lurched over a set of points on its approach to the station I stepped back into the carriage and said abruptly to Nick: ‘Are we going to meet again?’
‘Oh yes. And again. And again. And again.’
‘What a terrifying prospect!’
‘No, it’s okay, you don’t have to worry. I’m benign.’
‘I see,’ I said. ‘A recurring phenomenon which ought to be entirely harmless. Like Halley’s Comet.’
Finally I saw him smile. I noticed that he had good teeth, very even, and that when his mouth was relaxed he lost the air of solemnity conjured up by his spectacles. Again my memory was jogged, and as it occurred to me that he was as watchable as a gifted actor I at last solved the riddle of his familiarity. ‘Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘Are you any relation of Martin Darrow, the actor?’
‘He’s my half-brother.’
I relaxed. Although I’m not averse to paranormal puzzles I much prefer mysteries that are capable of a rational explanation. ‘My mother’s mad on him,’ I said agreeably, ‘never misses an episode of his comedy series, stays glued to the TV. But surely he must be at least thirty years older than you are?’
‘My father had a rather peculiar private life.’
‘Come on, chaps!’ exclaimed Charley, plunging bossily back into the carriage as the train finally halted at the platform. ‘Get a move on! Nick, as you’ve only got a duffle-bag, could you give Venetia a hand with her suitcases?’
I stepped down on to the platform accompanied by my psychic porter. The sun was shining and far away in the distance beyond the train, beyond the railway yard, beyond the roofs of the mean little villas which flanked the tracks, I saw the slim straight spire of the Cathedral.
Blazing with energy Charley bounded ahead and by the time Nick and I emerged from the station he was bouncing towards the episcopal car, a black Rover, as Mrs Ashworth emerged from the driver’s seat. I knew now, six years after our first meeting, that she was the same age as Aysgarth, but on that day she looked more like forty-five than sixty-one. It was not only her slender figure which made her seem youthful but the smooth straight hair coiled simply in a bun; an elderly woman who has the guts to flout fashion by refusing a permanent wave really does deserve to look a long way from the geriatric ward.
Ever since our first meeting when she had boldly identified me as a femme fatale despite the massive evidence to the contrary, I had secretly labelled her my heroine and now, once again, my admiration for her was renewed. She was wearing a pale lilac-coloured raincoat, unbuttoned to reveal a straight grey skirt and a sky-blue blouse – unremarkable clothes, but on her they looked as if they had arrived by special messenger that morning from Paris. Her navy shoes, so different from the old ladies’ ‘support’ footwear which my mother favoured, were notable for the elegance of their stiletto heels. Mrs Ashworth might have turned sixty, but this boring fact had evidently long since been dismissed by her as trivial. Her triumph over the ravages of time was superb.
‘Hullo, Nicholas!’ she exclaimed warmly after she had given Charley a peck on the cheek, but I knew she was much more interested in me. ‘Venetia – what a surprise! I saw Dido Aysgarth earlier today but she didn’t mention they were expecting you at the Deanery.’
‘They’re not expecting me. To be quite honest, Mrs Ashworth, I’m not exactly sure why I’m here. I’m a bit bouleversée at the moment.’
‘How exciting! Come and have tea. I’ve got a prayer-group turning up later and there’s a visiting American bishop who comes and goes like the Cheshire cat’s smile, but at the moment I’m absolutely free.’
My spirits rose, and accepting her invitation with gratitude I slid into the back seat of the Bishop’s Rover.
IV
The South Canonry, where the Ashworths lived, was an early Georgian house far smaller than the old episcopal palace but still too large for a modestly-paid executive with a wife and two adult sons. The garden consisted almost entirely of labour-saving lawns; full-time gardeners were no longer an episcopal perk, and the Ashworths were aided only by a man who came once a week to civilise the lawns with a motor-mower. Mrs Ashworth hated gardening and kept no plants in the house. I always found the bare, uncluttered look in her home immensely appealing.
As I was almost the same age as Charley I had been invited to the house occasionally in the past along with various Aysgarths and other young people in the diocese, but the visits had been infrequent and I had never come to know the Ashworths well. Neither had my parents. My father respected the Bishop’s intellect but found Ashworth was fundamentally unsympathetic to his sentimental, old-fashioned brand of humanism. Whereas Aysgarth was tolerant of agnostics Ashworth seemed hard put to conceal his opinion that agnosticism was an intellectual defect – and there were other differences too, as we all discovered over the years, between the Bishop and the Dean. Aysgarth was gregarious with an apparently inexhaustible supply of good humour, whereas Ashworth, behind his cast-iron charm, was a very private, very serious man. Laymen like my father dubbed Ashworth ‘churchy’ – that sinister pejorative adjective so dreaded by clerics – but Aysgarth was unhesitatingly labelled ‘one of us’. Ashworth, isolated to some degree by the eminence of his office, was held to resemble Kipling’s cat who walked by himself; his close friends had been left behind in Cambridge in 1957, and perhaps this was one of the reasons why he was so close to his wife. It was widely observed how well attuned they were to each other. They seemed to generate that special harmony which one finds more often among childless couples, the harmony of two people who find each other entirely sufficient for their emotional needs.
Considering that the marriage was successful, people found it immensely interesting that the two sons should have undergone such obvious problems: Charley had run away from home when he was eighteen while later Michael had been thrown out of medical school. However, these embarrassing episodes now belonged to the past. Charley had been rescued, sorted out and replaced on the rails of conformity, while Michael had been steered into the employment of the BBC with happy results. Why Charley should have run away from home no one had any idea, but Michael’s hedonistic behaviour was universally attributed to a desire to rebel against his father’s puritanical views on sin.
‘There’s a screw loose in that family somewhere,’ Dido would say darkly, ‘you mark my words.’
The irony of this statement was that Aysgarth had the biggest possible screw loose in his family – Dido herself – yet all his children were turning out wonderfully well. This fact must have been very galling to the Ashworths as they struggled to surmount their problems at the South Canonry.
When I arrived at the house that afternoon I was immediately soothed by its well-oiled serenity. The drawing-room was notably dust-free and arranged with a tidiness which was meticulous but not oppressive. A superb tea was waiting to be served. The telephone rang regularly but was silenced almost at once by the Bishop’s secretary in her lair by the front door. Dr Ashworth himself was out, fulfilling an official engagement, but if he had been present he too would have been running smoothly, just like the house. I could remember him appearing during my past visits and saying to his wife: ‘What did I do with that memo on the World Council of Churches?’ or: ‘Whatever happened to that letter from the Archbishop?’ or: ‘What on earth’s the name of that clergyman at Butterwood All Saints?’ and Mrs Ashworth, indestructibly composed, would always know all the answers.
After tea Charley went upstairs to unpack, Nick wandered outside to tune into the right nature-vibes – or whatever psychics do in gardens – and Mrs Ashworth took me upstairs to her private sitting-room. Unlike my mother’s boudoir at Flaxton Hall there were no dreary antiques, no ghastly oil-paintings of long-dead ancestors, no boring photographs of babies and no vegetation in sight. The air smelt celestially pure. On the walls hung some black-and-white prints of Cambridge and a water-colour of the Norfolk Broads. The only framed photograph on the chimney-piece showed her husband as an army chaplain during the war.
‘Sit down,’ said Mrs Ashworth, closing the door. ‘Now that we’ve got rid of the men we can relax. Cigarette?’
‘I do like this room,’ I said, accepting the cigarette and sinking into a comfortable armchair. ‘It’s all you, isn’t it? Everything’s your choice. All my life I’ve had to put up with revolting inherited furniture and now I’ve finally reached the point where I’m determined to have a place of my own.’
‘Splendid! All young people need to express themselves through their surroundings. You should have seen Michael’s room when he went through his Brigitte Bardot phase!’
‘I bet Charley puts up all the right pictures,’ I said, not daring to ask what the Bishop had thought of the Bardot pin-ups.
‘Fortunately Charley only has space on his walls for books. My former employer Bishop Jardine left Charley his entire theological library – no doubt because Charley always said he wanted to be a clergyman when he grew up … But let’s get back to you. So you’re seeking a room of your own! But why seek it in Starbridge?’
‘I’m not sure that I will – I’ve only drifted down here because I’ve got a standing invitation to use the Put-U-Up sofa in Primrose’s flat. I’m such a drifter, Mrs Ashworth! I despise myself for drifting but I don’t seem able to stop. It’s as if I’m marking time, waiting for my life to begin, but nothing ever happens.’
‘When will you consider that your life’s begun? At the altar?’
I was grateful for her swift grasp of my dilemma. Well, I know marriage shouldn’t be the be-all and end-all of a woman’s life, but –’
‘It certainly was before the war. Perhaps this is a case where “the more things change the more they remain the same”.’
‘I think it must be. As I see it, I really do have to get married in order to live the kind of life I’d enjoy, but here I am, almost twenty-six, and I’m beginning to think: supposing I never marry, never win respect and status, never stop drifting – I could wind up wasting my entire life.’
‘A nightmarish prospect.’
Terrifying. And then I start to feel desperate – desperate, Mrs Ashworth, I can’t tell you how desperate I feel sometimes – and now I’m convinced I’ve got to act, got to get out of this rut –’
‘Well, it sounds to me as if you’re making progress at last! You’re looking for a place where you can express your real self; you’ve embarked on an odyssey of self-discovery … Do you have to worry about money?’
‘No, I’ve got a hefty income because I came into money from both my godmothers when I was twenty-one. Maybe that’s part of the problem? If I were penniless –’
‘– you’d hate it. I did. Now let’s consider your situation carefully –’
‘I don’t have a situation, Mrs Ashworth, I just have a non-event.’ The words suddenly began to stream out of my mouth. ‘I want to live – I mean live – I want to swill gin and chat about philosophy with a gang of brilliant people and smooch with handsome men and dance till dawn and burn the candle at both ends, but all I get are boring nine-to-five jobs, social events where I’m an embarrassing failure, no love-life and evenings spent swilling gin on my own while listening to Radio Luxemburg. I’ve never had a boyfriend. I did belong to a gang of clever people but they were all girls. Here I am, bursting to join in the Great Party of Life yet confined to the margins by my utter lack of sex appeal, and it’s awful, Mrs Ashworth, absolutely awful, so utterly vile and unfair –’
‘But anyone,’ said Mrs Ashworth, ‘can have sex appeal. It’s simply an attitude of mind.’
I stared at her. She gave me a sphinx-like smile. Enrapt I tried to speak but failed.
‘It’s all a question of confidence,’ said my heroine, flicking ash from her cigarette casually into the nearby tray, ‘and in your case it would be confidence in your appearance. You want to be able to walk into a room and think: I’m glamour personified – how lucky all those men are to see me!’
‘But I’m not beautiful!’
‘Neither was Cleopatra.’
‘Yes, but she was Queen of Egypt –’
‘– and she made the most of it. That’s what you have to do too – make the most of your assets. Stand up for a moment.’
I stood up.
‘Revolve.’
I revolved.
‘Yes,’ said Mrs Ashworth tranquilly, waving her cigarette to indicate I could sit down again, ‘it’s all very simple. Wear plain, tailored clothes which emphasise your waist and hips. Never wear flat shoes even though you happen to be tallish. Favour V-necks to distract the masculine eye from your shoulders and take care not to stoop – that only makes the shoulders more noticeable. And grow your hair.’
‘Grow it? But Mrs Ashworth, I’ll turn into a sort of yak!’
‘Nonsense, men adore the Pre-Raphaelite look. Oh, and go to a beauty salon and get advice on make-up. You have the most beautiful eyes. Make them a focal point.’
‘But do you really think that if I do all this –’
‘That’s just the beginning. Then you must plot how to get in with a crowd of clever, interesting people by exploiting a clever, interesting person who’s already known to you. How about Christian Aysgarth? You can’t be much younger than his wife.’
‘Well, yes, I do know Christian and Katie, but –’
‘Splendid! They’re your passport to your new life. Don’t linger in dull old Starbridge. Seek that room you want in Oxford and wangle your way into Christian’s set.’
‘But Christian just sees me as one of Primrose’s gang of virgin spinsters!’
‘He won’t when you arrive in Oxford flaunting glamorous eye make-up and Pre-Raphaelite hair. I think that you and Primrose,’ said Mrs Ashworth, careful in her choice of words, ‘may have reached the parting of the ways.’ Before I could comment she was adding with regret: ‘I wish I could invite you to stay tonight, but thanks to Nicholas and our visiting American bishop, we’ve got a full house.’
I said with curiosity: ‘What’s Nick’s connection with your family?’
‘His father and Charles have known each other for many years, and since Jon Darrow’s now very old Charles likes to keep a paternal eye on Nicholas to make sure he’s all right.’
‘Isn’t there a mother?’
‘She died. There’s a half-brother in London –’
‘The actor.’
‘That’s right – and there was a half-sister, but she’s dead now too and Nicholas never had much in common with her children.’
‘He’s very …’ I tried to find the right word but could only produce a banality ‘… unusual.’
‘Yes, isn’t he? Sometimes I think he needs a substitute mother, but I never feel my maternal instinct can stretch far enough to take him on – although I must say, my maternal instinct seems to have stretched out of sight during this conversation! I seem to have forgotten I’m a bishop’s wife. Instead of advising you to vamp the intellectuals of Oxford I should be telling you to get a job at the diocesan office and help me with my charity work in your spare time!’
I laughed but before I could reply the front door banged far away in the hall. ‘That’ll be either Charles or our American bishop,’ said Mrs Ashworth, rising to her feet, ‘and let’s hope it’s Charles. I do like Americans, but all that sunny-natured purring’s so exhausting.’
‘Darling!’ shouted the Bishop downstairs.
‘Coo-ee!’ called Mrs Ashworth with relief, and added indulgently to me: ‘Isn’t he funny? He so often arrives home and shouts: “Darling!” like that. It’s as if he has no idea what to do next and is waiting for instructions.’
In walked the Bishop, looking like a film star in a costume melodrama. The old episcopal uniform of apron, gaiters and frock-coat, so suitable for the eighteenth-century bishops who had had to ride around their dioceses on horseback, was finally giving way to more modern attire, but for his official engagement that afternoon Dr Ashworth had decided to be conservative, and he looked well in his swashbuckling uniform. He was two years older than Aysgarth, but like his wife he appeared younger – not much younger, perhaps, but he could still have passed for a man on the right side of sixty.
‘How are your parents?’ he said to me agreeably after the greetings had been exchanged.
‘Seething. I’ve just left home and embarked on a new life.’
He gave me his charming smile but it failed to reach the corners of his eyes. Perhaps he was trying to decide whether I could be classified as ‘wayward’ or ‘lost’ or even ‘fallen’. Smoothly he fell back on his erudition. ‘This sounds like a case of metanoia!’ he remarked. ‘By which I mean –’
‘I know what it means. The Dean told me. It’s a turning away from one’s old life and the beginning of a new one.’
‘In Christ,’ said the Bishop casually, as if correcting an undergraduate who had made an error in a tutorial. ‘I hope the Dean didn’t forget to mention Christ, but these liberal-radicals nowadays seem to be capable of anything.’ He turned to his wife and added: ‘I lost count of the times I was asked about Honest to God this afternoon. People were deeply upset. It’s a pity Robinson wasn’t there to see the results of his ill-informed, half-baked radicalism.’
‘I thought Robinson was supposed to be a conservative,’ I said. ‘After all, he wasn’t invited to contribute to Soundings, was he?’
The Bishop looked startled. ‘Who’s been talking to you of Soundings?’
‘The Dean was very enthusiastic when the book was published.’
‘I’d have more confidence in Stephen’s bold espousal of the views contained in these controversial books if I knew he was a trained theologian,’ said Dr Ashworth. ‘However, as we all know, he read Greats, not Theology, when he was up at Oxford.’
‘But since he’s been a clergyman for almost forty years,’ I said, ‘don’t you think he might have picked up a little theology somewhere along the way?’
The Bishop was clearly not accustomed to being answered back by a young female who had never even been to a university. Possibly he was unaccustomed to being answered back by anyone. He took a moment to recover from the shock but then said suavely enough: ‘Good point! But perhaps I might draw a parallel here with the legal profession. Barristers and solicitors are all qualified lawyers, but when a knotty legal problem arises the solicitors refer the matter to the barristers, the experts, in order to obtain the best advice.’
‘Well, I’m afraid I must now leave you to your expertise,’ I said politely, rising to my feet, ‘and descend from the mountain top of the South Canonry to the valley of the Deanery.’ I turned to my hostess. Thanks so much for the tea and sympathy, Mrs Ashworth.’
‘Drop in again soon,’ said my heroine with a smile, ‘and if there’s anything I can do, just let me know.’
‘Yes indeed,’ said the Bishop, suddenly becoming pastoral. ‘If there’s anything we can do –’
‘I’ll see you out, Venetia,’ said his wife, and led the way downstairs to the hall. As she opened the front door she added: ‘You won’t want to lug your suitcases to the Deanery – I’ll ask Charley to bring them over later in the car.’
I thanked her before saying anxiously: ‘I do hope I didn’t upset the Bishop when I answered back.’
‘My dear, he was enthralled! Such a delightful change for him to meet someone who doesn’t treat him as a sacred object on a pedestal.’ She looked at me thoughtfully with her cool dark eyes before musing: ‘Maybe you’ve been concentrating on the wrong age-group; very few young men have the self-assurance or the savoir-faire to cope with clever women. Try looking for something intelligent, well-educated and pushing forty.’
‘It’ll be either married or peculiar.’
‘Not necessarily … Didn’t I hear a rumour once that Eddie Hoffenberg was rather smitten with you?’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Mrs Ashworth – I’d rather die a virgin spinster!’
Mrs Ashworth merely smiled her enigmatic smile and said: ‘Do keep in touch.’
I drifted away down the drive towards the Deanery.
V
Eddie Hoffenberg emerged from the Deanery just as I approached the front door, so there was no possibility of avoiding him. My father had once referred to him as ‘Aysgarth’s poodle – that bloody Hun,’ but my father, who had lost his best friends in the First War, was notorious for his anti-German sentiment. Other people, less outspoken than my father, were content to regard Eddie with a polite antipathy. ‘It’s my cross,’ Eddie would say with gloomy relish, and sometimes he would even add: ‘Suffering is good for the soul.’
‘It’s clergymen like Eddie Hoffenberg,’ I had said once to Primrose, ‘who make Christianity look like an exercise in masochism.’
‘It’s Germans like Eddie Hoffenberg,’ said Primrose, ‘who encourage the belief that we were doing them a favour by trying to kill them in the war.’
However although there was no denying that Eddie was a German, he was hardly typical of Hitler’s so-called master race, and the fact that he had eventually acquired British citizenship marked him out as a very unusual German indeed. He was tall, bald and bespectacled; his faintly Semitic cast of features had caused him to be bullied by Aryan monsters in the Nazi army, but since he had no Jewish blood in him, this experience had provided him with additional evidence that he was doomed to special suffering. Fortunately his army career had been brief. In 1944 at the age of twenty he had been captured by the British in Normandy, imported to England and dumped in a prison camp on Starbury Plain. Two weeks later Aysgarth, then Archdeacon of Starbridge, had paid a pastoral visit to the camp and naturally Eddie had been quite unable to resist the opportunity to moan to him about how awful life was.
It was not difficult to understand why Eddie had chosen to adopt Aysgarth as a hero, but it was far harder to understand why Aysgarth had chosen to return Eddie’s devotion. ‘Aysgarth has five sons,’ my father remarked once to my mother. Why should he want to play the father to a Teutonic disaster who’s perpetually encased in gloom?’ My mother had no answer, but Primrose eventually produced an explanation. ‘Eddie changed Father’s life,’ she told me. ‘It was Eddie who wrote to Bishop Bell and said how wonderful Father was with the POWs, and since that letter led to Father’s vital friendship with Bell, Father can’t help being sentimental about Eddie and regarding him as a mascot.’
Eddie came from Dresden, which had been devastated by fire-bombing in 1945– None of his family had survived. After the war he had quickly reached the decision that he had to begin a new life elsewhere, and when he thought of the one friend he still possessed he sought Aysgarth’s help. Aysgarth encouraged him to be a clergyman. Eddie had been a Lutheran once, but that was in the old, vanished life. Once Aysgarth had extracted the necessary money from the new Anglo-German Churchmen’s Fellowship, Eddie began his studies at the Starbridge Theological College and spent his holidays with the Aysgarths in London.
Ordination as a clergyman of the Church of England followed and a curacy was squeezed out of a Westminster parish. (A German was lucky to get any job in Westminster, but the Bishop of London caved in after Aysgarth and Bell staged a joint assault.) When Aysgarth became Dean of Starbridge he at once approached the new bishop on Eddie’s behalf, and Dr Ashworth, striving to exercise a Christian spirit after his own years as a POW, proved unwilling to make any move which could be construed as anti-German. Possibly he also saw the chance of unloading his current diocesan problem, a seedy Starbridge parish in the area of the city known as Langley Bottom where there was a run-down Victorian monster of a church, an equally run-down Victorian monster of a vicarage and a working-class congregation of twenty.
Eddie the masochist embraced this challenge with zest. Having been trained at the Starbridge Theological College in its Ango-Catholic heyday under Nick’s father Jonathan Darrow, he had no hesitation in resorting to the most florid ritualism (traditionally popular among the religious members of the working classes), and before long the parish was rising from the dead. Consolidating his success Eddie slaved on, organising clubs, running Bible classes, raising money. The parishioners, who had at first regarded him with suspicion, came to the conclusion they preferred the attentions of a foreigner, even a German foreigner, to the ministrations of some toffee-nosed English gentleman who had been educated at a public school. (The plebs are such dreadful snobs.) Eddie flourished. The parish boomed. The Bishop was both amazed and admiring. When a residentiary canonry at last fell vacant at the Cathedral, he had no objection to Aysgarth’s suggestion that Eddie’s talents should now be employed in a more elevated sphere, and so Eddie became a canon, working hard at his Chapter duties and beavering away on various diocesan committees. He had arrived. Franz Eduard Hoffenberg, that pathetic young German prisoner of war, had been transformed into a pillar of the English ecclesiastical establishment. All he now had to do was live happily ever after.
Of course being Eddie he remained gloomy but it was impossible for him to dispute that his life was now very comfortable. He had a snug little house in the Close, a surrogate family, the Aysgarths, a reasonable income and a pleasant amount of prestige. No one was surprised when he made a success of the canonry. Discarding without difficulty the Anglo-Catholic trappings which he had used to conquer Langley Bottom, he fitted easily into the Cathedral’s middle-of-the-road pattern of worship. In theological matters he was more conservative than his hero, but like Aysgarth he was an idealist prone to talk soppily about the brotherhood of man when he had downed a couple of drinks. His odd, ungainly, pear-shaped figure was always carefully dressed. He observed English customs rigorously, even declaring how devoted he was to Walls’ pork sausages and Dickens when we all knew he must be hankering for bratwürst and Goethe. Priding himself on his mastery of slang he spoke English almost flawlessly except when he began to ponder on the mystery of suffering. Those were the occasions when I thought he was a joke. Otherwise I just thought he was a thundering bore.
As we encountered each other outside the Deanery that afternoon I inwardly recoiled but nevertheless achieved a passable smile.
‘Hi Eddie,’ I said and automatically added: ‘How are you?’ but that was a mistake. One never asked Eddie how he was. He was all too likely to reply in excruciating detail.
‘Well, as a matter of fact my back’s playing me up again,’ he began, ‘but I’ve found this wonderful osteopath who –’
‘Super! Is the Dean in?’
‘Yes, but we’re just off to evensong. I say, Venetia, I had no idea you were about to visit the Aysgarths!’
‘Ah well, ignorance is bliss, as the saying goes …’ I was trying to edge past him but his bulk was blocking the way. The Deanery, a rambling medieval concoction enhanced by Georgian meddling, had no formal drive up to the front door; instead a pebbled lane at the side of the house led to the old stables, while a flagstone path flanked with lavender bushes led through the front garden. Eddie was planted on the flagstones and I was trying to slink past the lavender.
‘Are you here for long?’ Eddie was enquiring, apparently unaware of my attempts at circumnavigation.
‘No, I’m heading for Oxford.’
The front door swung wide. ‘Venetia!’ cried Aysgarth in delight. ‘What a marvellous surprise!’
‘Mr Dean!’ I said as my spirits soared, and firmly pushing my way past Eddie I clasped Aysgarth’s outstretched hand.
VI
‘Must see you!’ I hissed. ‘Top secret!’
His bright blue eyes at once became brighter and bluer. He loved being conspiratorial with young women. ‘You go on ahead,’ he called to Eddie. ‘I’ll catch you up.’
‘We’re late already, Stephen –’
‘I’ll run all the way to the vestry!’ said Aysgarth lightly, and with reluctance Eddie sloped off through the front gate.
Wasting no time I said: ‘I’ve left home and I need advice. Any chance of a quick word without half the Close breathing down our necks?’
‘Meet me in the cloisters after evensong.’
‘Wonderful! Thanks so much … In that case I might as well go to evensong, mightn’t I?’
‘Why not?’ said the Dean amused. ‘It would help to pass the time!’
As it occurred to me that Dr Ashworth would have responded far more coolly to my lukewarm attitude to worship I exclaimed: ‘How glad I am you’re not the Bishop! I’ve just been hobnobbing with him at the South Canonry.’
‘How on earth did you end up there?’
‘I got mixed up with Charley on the train. Mr Dean, what do you think of Honest to God?’
‘Superb! Quite splendid! A breath of fresh air sweeping through the Church of England!’
‘Yes, I thought it probably was. The Bishop’s decided it’s absolutely the bottom.’
‘The trouble with Charles,’ said Aysgarth as we left the garden, crossed Canonry Drive and entered the churchyard of the Cathedral, ‘is that he was trained as a theologian. Such a pity! A theologian’s approach to religion is nearly always much too cerebral and he inevitably becomes cut off from ordinary believers.’
‘But isn’t this book supposed to be bad for ordinary believers?’
‘Rubbish! It’s the best thing that’s happened to them for years. Robinson’s realised that the ordinary believers are waiting for a new comprehensible interpretation of Christianity which will relate to the lives they’re living right now in the 1960s – they’re not waiting for cerebral restatements by theologians in their dead, dry, alienating academic language!’
‘But if the book’s too radical –’
‘Nothing could be too radical! Let’s have this New Reformation Robinson talks about! Let’s have this New Morality! Now that we’re finally emerging from the long shadow of the war and shedding the millstone of the Empire, we need to celebrate our psychological liberation by making everything new – so why not start by flinging religion into the melting-pot, as Robinson suggests, and recasting our beliefs in a bold, creative dynamic style that’s thoroughly attuned to our day and age?’
I began to feel excited – insofar as one can ever feel excited about a subject such as theology. I was, in fact, very much in the mood for revolution and I deeply fancied the thought of an iconoclastic assault on any part of the established order. ‘Long live Bishop John Robinson!’ I declared, making Aysgarth laugh, and we quickened our pace across the sward to the Cathedral.
VII
At the north porch we parted, Aysgarth walking on to the Dean’s door, the special entrance for the clergy, and I wandering through the porch into the nave. A sidesman showed me to a seat in the choir. This was not an unusual favour to bestow prior to a weekday service when few laymen would be present, but nevertheless it made me feel privileged.
The Cathedral was quiet. By that time the tourists had left and it had reverted to the inhabitants of Starbridge, most of whom preferred to admire it loyally from afar. However the congregation did eventually mount to thirty. I sat gazing up at the vaulted ceiling and trying to think noble thoughts, but I was pondering on Mrs Ashworth’s advice about eye make-up when the organ marked the beginning of the service.
I liked the weekday choral evensong. It required no effort apart from kneeling down and standing up at regular intervals, and there was no sermon either to stretch the brain or induce rigor mortis. The choirboys sang in their unearthly voices; the vicars-choral bayed with authority; the vergers marched around providing touches of ceremonial; the clergy lolled meditatively in their stalls. I thought it was all so luxuriously restful, like a hot bath garnished with an expensive perfume, and as I watched the sun slant through the great west window I thought how clever God was to have invented the Church of England, that national monument dedicated to purveying religion in such an exquisitely civilised form.
Aysgarth was looking untidy as usual. His shop-soiled white hair always seemed to need trimming. Wearing a dignified expression he rose to his feet to read the lessons, while in the intervals Eddie, crammed into his canon’s stall at the other end of the choir, intoned the versicles and recited the prayers. I was always surprised by how well Eddie did this, but no doubt Aysgarth had trained him not to sound as if he was fathoms deep in depression. Aysgarth himself read the lessons beautifully in his deep, resonant voice. In fact I was so busy thinking how well he read that I forgot to listen to what he was reading. Appalled by my lack of concentration I was on the point of making a new attempt to focus my mind on the service when I saw Nick Darrow staring at me from the opposite side of the choir. I supposed I had been too busy thinking about eye make-up to notice him earlier.
As soon as our glances met he looked away but I went on watching him and wondering if he was destined to be my lucky mascot. But mascot seemed the wrong word to describe someone like Nick. It was too cosy, too banal. For Nick Darrow I needed a word which implied magic, extraordinary happenings, paranormal phenomena –
‘Ah-ah-ah-men!’ sang the choir, winding up the service.
The organ trilled and fell silent for a moment before embarking on a fugue. Everyone hauled themselves to their feet. The choir tripped out jauntily, mission accomplished, and the clergy followed, looking inscrutable. Aysgarth never once glanced in my direction.
Wandering towards the transept I found Nick had fallen into step beside me.
‘Ah!’ I said, finally grasping the word I wanted. ‘It’s my Talisman! I shouldn’t be surprised to see you again, should I, but why are you on your own?’
‘Charley’s busy with his father.’
‘Mrs Ashworth was telling me about yours. I hear he’s very old.’
‘Yes, but he’s okay.’
‘How old is “old” exactly?’
‘He’ll be eighty-three in May. But he’s okay.’
‘Compos mentis?’
‘Yep.’
‘Super! I often think my father’s mad as a hatter. Is your father able to do much?’
‘Yep. He prays.’
‘Ah. All the time?’
‘No, he does see people occasionally.’
‘He sounds like a hermit!’
‘He is a hermit. But he doesn’t mind me being with him because we don’t have to talk.’
I suddenly realised I was gazing at him as if he were a creature from another planet. ‘How restful!’ I said, not sure what to say. ‘My father’s the very reverse of a silent hermit!’
‘He might become one later. My father only became a recluse after my mother died.’ He turned abruptly towards the nave. ‘So long.’
‘When are we due to meet again?’
He shrugged and walked away.
I gazed after him in fascination. Then heaving open the massive door in the south transept I passed at last into the cloisters.
VIII
In the centre of the quadrangle lay the lawn beneath which in previous centuries the eminent men of Starbridge had been buried, and overshadowing this ancient graveyard an enormous cedar tree towered above the roof of the colonnade. There was a faint breeze. The cedar’s dark upper branches were stirring against the pale, limpid sky.
I was still gazing at this tranquil scene when the door creaked behind me and Aysgarth slipped out of the transept. Unlike Dr Ashworth he had entirely rejected the archaic uniform of a senior churchman, but perhaps that was less because he wanted to be modern than because his thickset figure was unsuited to fancy dress. On that evening he was wearing a black suit, slightly crumpled, and the black clerical ‘stock’ which was worn over an ordinary shirt and secured by ties at the back beneath the jacket. He had no pectoral cross; he belonged to the generation of Protestant churchmen who thought such papist adornment pardonable only when adopted by bishops. His hair, perhaps disarranged when he had removed his surplice after the service, swooped wildly over his ears in undisciplined wings and bumped against the back of his stiff white clerical collar. He looked like an eccentric scientist who has just made an important discovery.
‘Let’s go and sit on Lady Mary Calthrop-Ponsonby!’ he suggested blithely as I moved to meet him.
‘I beg your pardon, Mr Dean?’
With a laugh he led the way to a wooden seat on the northwestern corner of the lawn, and as I drew closer I saw that the back of the seat bore a brass plaque inscribed: ‘In memory of Lady Mary Calthrop-Ponsonby, 12th February 1857–8th November 1941. “FIGHT THE GOOD FIGHT WITH ALL THY MIGHT.”’
‘Three cheers for Lady Mary,’ I said as we sat down, and told him how I had decided to abandon London in search of a new life. ‘… and I’ve now reached the point where I’m trying to decide what to do next,’ I concluded. ‘Mrs Ashworth thinks I should go to Oxford, park myself on Christian and Katie and wangle my way into their set, but I’m not sure I have the nerve to exploit them so brazenly.’
‘I don’t see why you shouldn’t stay with Christian and Katie for a few days while you decide if Oxford has anything to offer you, but I can’t quite see why Lyle is pointing you in that direction.’
‘She thinks I’d enjoy mixing with an intellectual jeunesse dorée.’
‘On the contrary I think you’d soon be bored stiff with all those academics.’
‘Would I? Are you sure? I just feel that if only I could get in with the right set –’
‘In my experience right sets tend to be much too fast.’
‘When one’s been crawling along like a tortoise, Mr Dean, the idea of pace begins to seem attractive.’
He laughed. ‘Was London really that bad?’
‘Yes, it really was. I’ve been a failure there. Don’t just tell me to go back and try again.’
‘Very well, let’s be more imaginative. This could be a great opportunity for you, Venetia! A fresh start is always a great opportunity, but you should remember that happiness isn’t ultimately dependent on getting in with the right set; it’s about serving God by using your God-given gifts in the best possible way.’
‘I only seem to have a God-given gift for drifting in and out of boring jobs.’
‘It’s obvious that you haven’t yet found your métier, and in my opinion pondering on the right métier, not choosing which city to live in, should actually be your number one concern at the moment. You need to escape to somewhere very quiet and very remote for a few days so that you can ponder in peace and see your situation in perspective … Come on holiday with me after Easter!’
I nearly fell off Lady Mary. ‘What a breathtaking suggestion!’
He laughed again before adding: ‘Dido’s not coming but Eddie’s accompanying me and Primrose is joining us twenty-four hours later. Come up on the Wednesday after Easter with Primrose!’
‘Where’s “up”?’
‘The Outer Hebrides.’
‘IS there an Outer Hebrides?’
‘Apparently. The new Earl of Starmouth has very kindly lent me his hunting-lodge on Harris.’
‘Don’t Elizabeth and Pip want to go?’
‘Dido’s taking them to her sister in Leicestershire where they’ll ride horses with her and be blissfully happy.’
‘Chacun à son goût,’ I said. ‘Personally I’d rather live it up in a Caledonian Shangri-La.’
‘My sentiments exactly!’ said Aysgarth, and as he smiled I suddenly wondered if he, like me, was seizing the chance to escape from intractable private problems.
FOUR (#u1a2015f4-5a4f-576d-b3e6-9f4b56d41963)
‘What is most real to you? What matters most for you? Is it money and what money can buy? I doubt it, deep down. For you know that you can’t take it with you”. And seldom does it bring real happiness. Is it love? That’s a good deal nearer, because it has to do with persons, not things.’
JOHN A. T. ROBINSON
Suffragan Bishop of Woolwich 1559–1969
Writing about Honest to God in the Sunday Mirror, 7th April 1963.
I
After staying the night in Primrose’s flat, I caught a train the next morning to my country home at Flaxton Pauncefoot, a village which lay ten miles from the port of Starmouth in the south of the diocese. Here I sorted out some appropriate clothes for the holiday, selected a couple of books and dumped my current stock of dirty laundry on the housekeeper who returned it, faultlessly washed and ironed, that evening. Nowadays there are very few advantages in being a member of the aristocracy, but at least one never has to worry about laundries. Nor does one have to waste time shopping for food or sweating over a hot stove. I said to the housekeeper: ‘I’d like baked beans on toast with a poached egg on top, and tell Pardoe to look out a half-bottle of that nice St Julien, the one with the picture of the purple vineyard on it.’ That solved the problem of dinner.
Afterwards, greatly fortified, I phoned my mother to inform her I would be heading for the Hebrides, retired to the blue drawing-room where the television set lurked behind a fire-screen, and watched the latest episode of the comedy series Down at the Surgery in which two doctors have their virtue constantly assailed by a stream of diverse nymphomaniacs. The elder doctor was played by Martin Darrow with a professional deftness which prompted me to giggle so hard that I dropped cigarette ash all over the floor. He was far better looking than his young half-brother, but nevertheless I was conscious of the strong resemblance between them. I wondered idly what their father, the ancient hermit, thought of his elder son’s career as a television star.
The next morning I extracted my red MG from the stables, heaved my bags into the back and returned to Primrose’s flat. I had remembered it was Sunday but somehow I managed to arrive too late to attend matins, so taking advantage of the spring sunshine I lounged on the seat in the Deanery’s garden as I waited for everyone to return from the Cathedral. Unfortunately Primrose and the Dean stayed on for the sung Communion service. I should have remembered that possibility and removed myself, but I was still lolling in the sunshine when Dido turned up to torpedo me.
‘So there you are, Venetia! Primrose was under the impression you’d be back in time for matins. I do think you might have telephoned to say you’d be late, but then that’s the upper classes, isn’t it, my dear, always expecting the entire world to fall into step beside them, and personally I’ve always been devoutly thankful that I was merely the daughter of a self-made Scottish millionaire and irredeemably nouveau riche because at least I was taught consideration for others from the cradle. Now –’ She paused for breath as she parked herself purposefully on the bench beside me ‘– I’m so glad I’ve got the chance for a word alone with you, because I think it’s time that an intelligent, honest older woman – and as you know, my dear, I always pride myself on my candour – I think it’s time,’ said Dido, without even pausing for breath after this parenthesis, ‘that I gave you a piece of sensible and I hope not unaffectionate advice – because of course I’m very fond of you, Venetia, just as Stephen is, although I do see all your little faults and foibles rather more clearly than he does, because darling Stephen’s so noble that he always sees the best in everyone, whereas I, being a realist – and I’m always being complimented on my realism – I, being a realist,’ said Dido, battling her way out of the jungle of this monstrous sentence, ‘take a much more pessimistic view of humanity, and having been a rich young girl myself I know all about the pitfalls waiting to ensnare rich young girls who drift around without any proper direction – which brings me to what I want to say.’
I raised an eyebrow and looked hopeful.
‘What you have to do, my dear, is not simply to drift hither and thither like a piece of flotsam – or is it jetsam? – on the sea of life while you dabble in antiques and publishing or sidle off on little holidays to the Hebrides with an elderly clergyman who really should have known better than to invite you – although, of course, I do understand that darling Stephen, so soft-hearted, only wanted to be kind – but I’m afraid he didn’t stop to think, did he, that suggesting a holiday was actually only offering you a way of escaping from your problems, and what you really have to do, Venetia my dear, is not to escape from your problems but to face them. To put matters absolutely candidly, if you can’t find a husband you must find a suitably worthy cause to which you can devote your energies, and quite honestly – and I know it’s unfashionable to say this, but since I always believe in calling a spade a spade –’
I raised the other eyebrow and looked even more hopeful.
‘– I think you need to find God. I began my search for God when I was about your age – it was after my favourite sister died – and once Pd started I was always so cross with myself that I’d never started before because religion’s so absolutely fascinating and I can’t understand why it’s not taught properly in schools, especially when they go to such lengths to teach useless things like algebra and hockey. Anyway, once I’d started looking for God I met Stephen and lived happily ever after, and I think the same sort of thing might happen to you if only you could stop being so self-centred. As it happens I know the most wonderful clergyman in London who specialises in spiritual direction, and I’m quite certain that if I were to ring him up and tell him about you –’
‘How terribly kind of you, Mrs Aysgarth, but I’m afraid I’ve absolutely had it with London.’
‘Oh, that won’t last, you’ll go back, you’re a London person. Now my dear, I do hope you’re not thinking that darling Stephen will give you spiritual direction in the Hebrides, because Stephen’s not at all spiritual on holiday, he just likes to sit around eating and drinking and reading detective stories, and I honestly think he’d be most put out if you started chatting to him about God. Anyway, Stephen really can’t start giving spiritual direction to young girls, even here in Starbridge, because he’s much too busy running the Cathedral and keeping the Chapter from murdering each other, and even if he wasn’t much too busy he prefers to exercise his pastoral skills these days among men – and usually German men, as Eddie Hoffenberg will be the first to tell you. And talking of Eddie, I do think you might be kinder to him, he’s such a nice man and he’s had such awful tragedies in his life and he just doesn’t deserve to have you and Primrose poking fun at him behind his back. God only knows what the two of you will get up to in the Hebrides – I can just see you egging each other on and smirking in corners—and in fact to be quite candid and to cut a long story short, I think this holiday is a thoroughly bad idea for all concerned. Why don’t you and Primrose run off to Cornwall and leave those two clergymen to recharge their spiritual batteries in peace?’
‘I don’t think Primrose would care for that idea at all, Mrs Aysgarth.’
‘Oh, Primrose! If that girl were to spend a little less time doting on her father and a little more time being nice to Maurice Tait her life would be vastly improved – and so, God knows, would mine! In fact in my opinion you’d be doing us all the biggest possible favour, Venetia my dear, if you lured Primrose away to – no, not Cornwall, too unoriginal, how about the French Riviera? Take her to your sister’s villa at Juan-les-Pins!’
‘I don’t like the French Riviera.’
‘Well, you certainly won’t like the Hebrides. Dr Johnson thought it was quite awful, he told Boswell so.’
‘I don’t like Dr Johnson.’
‘Venetia dear, don’t you think you’re being just the teensiest bit negative?’
‘I’m sorry, Mrs Aysgarth. It really is so kind of you to worry about my spiritual welfare, and I’ll think very carefully about everything you’ve said, I promise.’
We looked at each other. Her hard dark eyes bore a sharp, shrewd, sceptical expression, and although I tried to exude a docile respect I knew she was not deceived. Rising to her feet abruptly she said: ‘I must see about lunch. Why don’t you come indoors and have a chat with Elizabeth? She always feels so hurt when you and Primrose go out of your way to ignore her.’
Smiling meekly but seething with rage I followed her into the house to talk to her daughter.
II
Primrose usually ate her meals in her flat, but for Sunday lunch, that sacred British institution, she joined her family in the Deanery dining-room, and on that Sunday before Easter I sat with her at the long table. As usual on such occasions, a crowd turned up. In addition to Dido’s two children – not only Elizabeth, who was now a precocious fourteen, but little Pip, who was a nine-year-old pupil at the Choir School – there was a female called Miss Carp, known within the family as Polly (in memory of Polycarp, a bishop of the Early Church); she kept the household running while Dido poked her nose into everyone else’s business, popped up to London to patronise Harrods and pampered herself with the occasional attack of nervous exhaustion, a condition which Primrose described as ‘sheer bloodyminded self-indulgence’. There had been a succession of au pair girls who had looked after the children, but these creatures had been dispensed with once Pip had begun his career at the Choir School.
The other guests at lunch that day consisted of Aysgarth’s second son by his first marriage, Norman, who lectured in law at King’s College, London, Norman’s wife Cynthia who always looked as if she might sleep with everyone in sight but probably never did (although my sister Arabella always said Cynthia was the vainest, most sex-mad girl she ever met – and coming from Absolutely-the-Bottom Arabella that was really something), Aysgarth’s third son James, the jolly Guardsman who was so good at talking about nothing, James’s girlfriend, whose name I failed to catch although it was probably Tracy or Marilyn or something non-U, Aysgarth’s fourth and final son by his first marriage, Alexander, known as Sandy, who was doing postgraduate work up at Oxford, a chum of Sandy’s called Boodle (I never found out his real name either), two elderly female cousins of Dido’s from Edinburgh who appeared to be quite overwhelmed by all the English, Primrose, me and – inevitably – Aysgarth’s most devoted hanger-on, Eddie Hoffenberg. The two people whom I most wanted to see – Aysgarth’s eldest son Christian and his wife – were conspicuous by their absence.
‘They were here last weekend,’ explained Primrose.
All Aysgarth’s children visited their home regularly and all appeared to get on well with their father who was unfailingly benevolent to them. The contrast with my own family could hardly have been more marked. My elder brother Harold was too stupid to hold my father’s attention for long, and although my brother Oliver was no fool – no genius but no fool – he too was uninterested in intellectual matters. Henrietta, Arabella and Sylvia could only be regarded by my father as pretty little playthings. I drove him up the wall. In consequence family gatherings were notable for my father’s impatience and irritability, my mother’s valiant efforts to pour oil on troubled waters, and my siblings muttering to one another in corners that ‘Pater’ really was getting a bit much and Mama had to be some kind of saint to stand him and only a liberal supply of champagne could save everyone from going completely and utterly bonkers.
At the Aysgarths’ lunch that day everyone talked animatedly, Dido inflicting her usual outrageous monologues on her defenceless cousins – with occasional asides to Eddie Hoffenberg who took seriously his Christian obligation to be charitable – Norman commenting on some judge named Denning (this was just before the Profumo affair made Denning famous), Cynthia describing the work of some besotted artist who yearned to paint her portrait, James saying: ‘Realty? How splendid!’ at intervals, Sandy and Boodle arguing over the finer points of Plato’s Dialogue on the Soul, Elizabeth throwing out the information that actually she was an Aristotelian and that Plato simply rang no bells for her at all, Primrose arguing that the whole trouble with the Roman Church was that St Thomas Aquinas had based his Summa on Aristotle’s philosophy, and my Mr Dean chipping in to observe that the world was always divided into Aristotelians and Platonists, and wasn’t the treacle tart absolutely first-class. In the midst of all these stimulating verbal fireworks, little Pip, who was sitting thoughtfully on my left, turned to me and said: ‘Do you like the Beatles, Venetia?’
‘They’re a little young for me, Pip, but I liked “Love Me Do”.’
‘I think they’re fab,’ said Pip. ‘Much better than Plato or Aristotle.’
One of the most attractive aspects of life with the Aysgarths was the wide range of the topics discussed. I doubt if my parents and siblings had heard of the Beatles in the spring of ’sixty-three.
Later in the drawing-room I had an interesting talk about politics with Norman but Cynthia became jealous and winkled him away from me. By this time the Dean had shut himself in his study for his post-prandial snooze, but Eddie Hoffenberg was still hovering as if eager to tell me about his osteopath, so I slipped away to take refuge in Primrose’s flat. Primrose herself had departed after lunch with her boyfriend Maurice Tait, one of the vicars-choral who sang tenor in the Cathedral choir and taught at the Choir School. In fact she cared little for Tait (a damp, limp individual whose hobbies were stamp-collecting and supporting the Bible Reading Fellowship) but she liked to keep him around so that she could talk about ‘my boyfriend’ and look worldly. I didn’t despise her for this. I wouldn’t have minded a neutral escort myself, if only to silence the fiends who muttered: ‘Poor old Venetia!’ behind my back, but no limp, damp individual had presented himself for acquisition. I didn’t count Eddie, of course. Not only was his Wagnerian gloom intolerable but he was so ugly that if I had accepted him as an escort the fiends would merely have gone on muttering: ‘Poor old Venetia!’
I also had to face the fact – an unpalatable one for my ego – that Eddie had never actually tried to do more than trap me in corners and talk about his health. He had never invited me to his house on my own or suggested a visit to the cinema – or even invited me for a walk on a Sunday afternoon. Tait always took Primrose for a walk down by the water-meadows after he had lunched with his mother. Primrose would sigh beforehand and say what a bore these walks were, but I suspected that if Tait had failed to appear one Sunday she would have been very cross indeed.
The rest of the day passed most agreeably, providing a tantalising glimpse of what fun life could be when one was accepted by a group of congenial people; at least at the Aysgarths’ house I was never left out in the cold. After tea we all played croquet and I beat everyone except Boodle. There was much laughter as we languished on the lawn. Then having completed my odyssey among the croquet hoops I ate baked beans on toast with Primrose in her flat and we discussed Life, a ritual which involved reviewing the day’s events, pulling everyone to pieces, putting a few favoured individuals together again and tossing the rest on the scrap-heap. This was fun. Primrose had her faults (priggishness, intolerance, intellectual snobbishness) but she was witty and seldom bored me. I only became bored when she was either talking soppily about her father or droning drearily about her work at the diocesan office on Eternity Street. Every time she began a sentence with the words The Archdeacon and F, my teeth automatically gritted themselves, so when at ten o’clock that evening the dread words tripped off her tongue I waited until she had finished her sentence and then immediately asked if I could have a bath. Half an hour later I was stretched out on the Put-U-Up sofa, now transformed into a bed, and tuning into Radio Luxemburg on my transistor.
‘Good heavens, Vinnie!’ exclaimed Primrose, appearing crossly in curlers as I was smoking a final cigarette and wriggling my toes in time to Elvis Presley. ‘You’re not still listening to that drivel, are you? I can’t understand why you’re so keen on pop music!’
‘No, you wouldn’t. You’re not fundamentally interested in sex.’
‘Honestly, Venetia! What a thing to say!’ She flounced back to her bedroom.
Elvis quivered on vibrantly. As I stubbed out my cigarette I wondered – not for the first time – if anyone would ever invite me to have sexual intercourse, but it seemed like a forlorn hope. Switching off the transistor I pulled the bed-clothes over my head and allowed myself to shed a single furious tear of despair.
III
Easter was the following weekend. In the interval I loafed, smoked and vegetated, unwilling to think deeply about the future and telling myself I needed a few days of absolute rest in order to recuperate from the horrors of London life. I did toy with the idea of reading Honest to God but the desire to escape from my problems by being intellectually mindless was so strong that I could only reread Primrose’s childhood collection of Chalet School books.
Finally I was roused from my torpor by the spectacle of Easter in a great cathedral. I avoided the Good Friday services but attended matins on Sunday morning and was rewarded when Aysgarth preached a most interesting sermon about how Christianity was all set to undergo a dynamic resurrection, recast and restated for the modern age. The Bishop, who was ensconced in his cathedra at one end of the choir, spent much time gazing up at the east window as if he were wondering how it could possibly be cleaned.
The next day Aysgarth was obliged to supervise the conclusion of the special services, but on Tuesday he was free to depart for the Hebrides; he and Eddie planned to drive to Heathrow airport and leave the car in the long-term car-park. At half-past eight that morning after Primrose had departed for her office I wandered across the courtyard of the stables to say goodbye to him, but no sooner had I entered the house by the side-door than I heard Dido’s voice, throbbing with emotion, in the hall. Automatically I stopped dead. I was still well out of sight beyond the stairs.
‘… I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I absolutely swore I wouldn’t break down like this, but I do so wish you were coming to Leicestershire – I know horses bore you, but you could read quietly in the library and –’
‘Darling –’
‘– and at least you’d be there. I just think it’s so sad for Elizabeth and Pip that we’re never together on our own as a family –’
‘But that’s not true!’
‘Not on our own, Stephen – there’s always someone from your first marriage there – all right, we won’t talk of Primrose, but it just seems so wrong that we’re not going to be together –’
‘But when Lord Starmouth offered me the lodge the first thing I did was ask you to come with me!’
‘How could I when I’m ill every time I try to go in a plane?’
‘I was quite prepared to go overland, but since you were adamant that nothing would induce you to go to the Hebrides –’
‘I thought you’d back down and come to Leicestershire. I never dreamed you’d run off instead with Primrose and Eddie and – my God! – Venetia –’
‘What’s wrong with Venetia? Isn’t she Primrose’s best friend and the daughter of one of my own oldest friends?’
‘I don’t give a damn who she is, that girl’s sly, not to be trusted, a trouble-maker –’
‘My dearest, I really don’t think this conversation does you justice –’
‘Oh, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, it’s just that I feel so depressed, so alone, so utterly abandoned –’
There was a silence. I guessed he had been driven to silence her with an embrace. Pressing my back against the wall of the passage I held my breath and waited until at last she said tearfully: ‘How I hate separations!’
‘I’ll write every day.’
‘If only there was a phone at this stupid place –’
‘I’ll try and phone from the nearest village.’
‘Promise?’
‘Of course I promise.’
‘Oh Stephen …’ Another silence elapsed before Aysgarth said abruptly: ‘Here’s Eddie with the car. Quick, take my handkerchief and dry your eyes – where are the children?’
‘I don’t know … Elizabeth! Pip! Your father’s leaving!’
At once I slipped silently away.
IV
Primrose and I began our journey north twenty-four hours later after the day-long diocesan conference of the Young Christians for Peace, an event which Primrose had helped to organise and which apparently could not take place without her. Primrose had always been an enthusiastic organiser. She had acquired the taste for power when she had become a Girl Guide leader, and since then the local branches of the Student Christian Movement, the Bible Reading Fellowship, the Missions to Africa Fund and the Inter-Faith League had all benefited from her efficient interference.
‘You really ought to get interested in some worthwhile cause, Venetia!’ she exclaimed as she returned, flushed with triumph, from her conference. ‘If I were to do nothing but read dated schoolgirl books, watch television and listen to Radio Lux., I’d go mad in no time!’
I refrained from argument; I was all for a quiet life, and since I was a guest in her flat I had a moral obligation to be docile, but I realised then that Mrs Ashworth had been correct in deducing that Primrose and I had reached the parting of the ways.
Meanwhile we had to go on holiday together. Driving to Heathrow in my MG we caught a late-morning flight to Glasgow and arrived in the town of Stornoway, the capital of the Outer Hebrides, in the middle of the afternoon. Although it was the largest settlement on the island of Lewis and Harris, the town was small and the airport was primitive. On stepping out of the little plane I felt a soft damp wind on my cheek. A vast vista of white clouds and green treeless wastes stretched before me, but when I had an immediate impression not of desolation but of peace I realised my mood of torpor was at last beginning to dissolve.
‘There’s Eddie,’ said Primrose.
Eddie’s ungainly figure was clad in the English holiday uniform of grey trousers, a casual shirt and a tweed jacket, but he still managed to look like a foreigner; the uniform was much too well-tailored. He was driving a hired car, a faded white Morris which had seen better days but which bucketed along the narrow roads with surprising spirit. Lewis, I realised as I stared out of the window later at Harris, was the tame, domesticated part of the island. Harris was all bare hills and sinister peat-bogs and glowering little lakes with hardly a croft in sight. Yet I was intrigued. It seemed light years away from London, and beyond the village of Tarbert we appeared to leave civilisation behind completely. A single-track road adorned with the occasional hardy weed wound through brutal hills. Now and then the sea was visible as a lurid strip of midnight blue. Squalls of rain swooped down from the hills and swept away along the coast. Rainbows appeared fleetingly during improbable bursts of sunshine. The car groaned but battled on. I began to be excited.
‘Is there really anything at the end of this road, Eddie?’
‘Wait and see!’ He pulled the car round a hairpin bend, and a second later Primrose and I were both exclaiming in wonder. Before us lay a small bay, shaped like a crescent moon and fringed with pale sand. Overlooking this idyllic seascape stood an Edwardian house, not too big but solid and well-proportioned. Beyond a walled garden the brown-green moors, dotted with rocks, rose towards mountains capped by cloud.
‘Just like Wuthering Heights!’ remarked Primrose. True romantic isolation! All we need now is Heathcliff.’
The front door opened as if on cue, and the Dean of Starbridge stepped out into the porch to welcome us.
V
Despite its remoteness the house turned out to be very comfortable, in that plain tasteful style that always costs a lot of money, and this comfort was enhanced by a married couple who did all the boring things such as cooking, shopping, cleaning and keeping the peat fires burning. At that time of the year in the far north the weather was still cold, particularly in the evenings, but having spent so much of my life at Flaxton Hall, where the heating was either non-existent or modest, I took the chill in my stride. In contrast, wretched Eddie was soon complaining of rheumatic twinges and saying that whenever he was in pain he was convinced he was going to die young.
‘In that case,’ said Primrose, ‘please do die now and save us from listening to any more of your moans,’ but at that point Aysgarth intervened, reminding Eddie lightly that life had been much worse in the POW camp on Starbury Plain and begging Primrose not to encourage anyone to die because it would be so annoying to have to cut short the holiday.
Our days in the wilderness began with breakfast at nine. Eddie then walked to the village and collected the specially ordered copy of The Times; on his return he studied it for twenty minutes. Another brisk trot followed, this time up and down the beach, but finally he allowed himself to relax in the morning-room with The Brothers Karamazov.
In contrast Aysgarth followed quite a different pattern of activity. After breakfast he sat in the drawing-room for a while and gazed at the sea. Then he dipped into one of his newly-purchased paperbacks (all detective stories) and read a few pages. More sea-gazing followed but at last he roused himself sufficiently to pen a letter to his wife. (‘The daily chore,’ commented Primrose to me once in a grim aside.) By the time the letter was finished Eddie had returned from the village but Aysgarth refused to read the newspaper in detail after Eddie had discarded it; he merely glanced at the headlines and tried to do the crossword. Despite his intellect he was very bad at crosswords, almost as bad as he was at bridge, and had to be helped by Primrose and me. The completion of the puzzle took at least twice as long as it should have done because we all spent so much time laughing, but once the last letter had been pencilled in Aysgarth invariably announced with regret: ‘I suppose I ought to take some exercise.’ He then staggered outside, inhaled deeply a few times and staggered back indoors again. As soon as the clock in the hall chimed twelve he declared it was time for drinks. Eddie, who preferred to abstain from alcohol till the evening, remained in the morning-room with The Brothers Karamazov but Aysgarth and I would swill champagne while Primrose toyed with her customary glass of dry sherry.
At some time during the morning Primrose and I would have been out, either scrambling along the rocky coast or following the path up into the stark wild hills. It rained regularly, but since we always wore macks and sou’westers the weather was never a serious inconvenience. Besides, the rain never lasted long. When the sun did shine we continually marvelled at the colours around us: the sea was a sapphire blue, the waves bright white, the sands dark cream, the moors green-brown mixed with ash-grey rock. Primrose took numerous photographs while I tried to impress the scenes on my memory and wished I could paint. Often as we scrambled along the low cliffs we saw seals playing near the beach, and several times in the hills we glimpsed deer. There were never any people. As the days passed my sense of peace increased until I even began to wish I could have been one of those ancient Celtic saints, dedicated to a solitary life in a remote and beautiful place in order to worship God. At least I would have been spared the rat-race in London and the hell of attending the Great Party of Life as a wallflower.
After lunch every day Aysgarth retired for ‘forty winks’, which usually lasted half an hour, Primrose and I read The Times and Eddie wrote letters. Then at three o’clock we departed with a picnic tea for an outing in the car. All over the long island we rambled; on two consecutive days we stopped on the road to Leverburgh at a point above the vast sands which stretched across the bay towards the distant range of blue mountains, and twice we visited the remote church at Rodel on the southernmost tip of Harris. Then I, who was so very bad at worship and so very reluctant to be ‘churchy’, found myself thinking of Jesus Christ, living thousands of miles away in another culture in another millennium, writing nothing, completing his life’s work in three years, a failure by worldly standards, dying an ignoble death – yet still alive in the little church at Rodel on the remotest edge of Europe, still alive for his millions upon millions of followers worldwide, not a despised, rejected failure any more but acknowledged even by non-Christians as one of the greatest men who had ever lived, etched deep on the consciousness of humanity and expressing his mysterious message of regeneration in that most enigmatic of all symbols, the cross.
‘What are you thinking about, Venetia?’ said that pest Eddie, ruining my rare moment of feeling religious as I stood staring at the church.
‘Elvis Presley,’ I said to shut him up. Eddie loathed pop music.
By then I was missing my daily dose of the pops on Radio Luxemburg which seemed to be unobtainable in the Hebrides; perhaps the weather conditions were unfavourable – or perhaps Luxemburg was merely too far away. The BBC in those days devoted little time to musical trivia so my deprivation was severe, but on the other hand there was little time to tune into the wireless. When we returned from our picnic the moment had arrived for a gin-and-tonic for me, whisky for the men and another glass of sherry for Primrose. During dinner we sampled a claret or a white burgundy – or possibly, depending on the menu, both; Aysgarth was taking seriously his absent host’s invitation that we should help ourselves to his well-stocked cellar. After dinner we played bridge or, if we were feeling frivolous, vingt-et-un. Conversation, spiked by all the drink, sparkled. Even Eddie shuddered with mirth occasionally.
‘Father,’ said Primrose late one evening after Eddie had scooped the pool of matchsticks at vingt-et-un and Aysgarth had suggested a nightcap of brandy, ‘isn’t this holiday turning into a distinctly Bacchanalian orgy?’
‘I hope so!’ said Aysgarth amused.
‘So do I!’ I said at once. ‘Primrose, these poor clergymen spend months on end being saintly and strait-laced – why on earth shouldn’t they let their hair down on holiday?’
That idiotic Eddie was unable to resist sighing: ‘“Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die.”’
‘Well, I’m not dying yet!’ declared Aysgarth robustly. ‘I’ve still got a lot of living to do!’
A chord twanged in my memory. ‘“I’ve gotta – whole lotta living to do!”’ I sang, imitating Presley. ‘“Whole lotta loving to do – and there’s-uh no one-uh who I’d rather do it-uh with-uh than you – COME ON, BABY!”’
‘Venetia!’ exclaimed Eddie, appalled by the vulgarity, his eyes almost popping out of his head.
‘Venetia!’ cried Primrose scandalised, casting an embarrassed glance at her father.
‘What a splendid song!’ said my Mr Dean naughtily, unable to resist the urge to shock them still further. ‘Does it come from the repertoire of those young men Pip likes so much?’
‘The Beatles? No, it’s an Elvis Presley number.’
‘Ah, Mr Presley! The Bishop thinks his records ought to be banned – which inevitably means they’re first-class fun. “Charles,” I said to him after I’d supported the publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, “the real obscenity in our culture isn’t sex. It’s violence.” But of course he refused to agree. Funny how Charles takes such a dark view of sex – it’s as if he can never forget some very profound sexual sin which affected him personally in some quite unforgettable way.’
‘Isn’t the most likely explanation,’ said Eddie, who had had a good deal to drink, ‘that he had a strong sex drive in his youth and that he was constantly afraid of giving way to temptation?’
‘I don’t know why you throw in the phrase “in his youth”, Eddie!’ said Aysgarth more naughtily than ever. ‘Why shouldn’t he still have a strong sex drive even now he’s past sixty?’
Eddie went pink. Primrose stood up and said brightly: ‘Who’s for cocoa?’
‘I thought we were all going to have a nightcap of brandy,’ I said. ‘Go on, Mr Dean! Do you think the Bishop and Mrs Bishop go in for Lady-Chatterley-style high jinks at the South Canonry?’
‘VENETIA!’ chorused the horrified voices of Canon Hoffenberg and Miss P. Aysgarth, Girl Guide leader.
The Dean could barely speak for laughing but managed to gasp: ‘Eddie, why don’t you keep Primrose company while she goes in search of cocoa? Venetia and I are going to discuss D. H. Lawrence!’
‘This is all your fault, Vinnie,’ said Primrose exasperated. ‘If you hadn’t mentioned Elvis Presley –’
‘I’d very much like to hear this Mr Presley,’ said Aysgarth. ‘Could we tune into Radio Luxemburg on that radiogram in the morning-room?’
‘Not a hope, Mr Dean – unless the reception’s a great deal better tonight than it’s been so far.’
‘Eddie,’ said Primrose, ‘let’s leave them to their decadence.’
Eddie said drunkenly: ‘We draw the line at rock-’n’-roll, Stephen!’ and stalked after her.
‘Snob!’ I shouted after him before adding to Aysgarth: ‘The mystery about that radiogram is that there appear to be no records to go with it. Wouldn’t you think that the Earl’s teenage daughters would keep a supply of old favourites here to wile away the rainy days?’
‘Let’s have a search!’ exclaimed Aysgarth, leaping to his feet.
‘Tally-ho!’ I cried, leading the charge into the hall. Then I stopped. ‘But it’s no good searching the morning-room,’ I said, ‘because I’ve already done that. I’ve searched the drawing-room too. Perhaps the attics –’
‘What about that cupboard over there under the stairs?’
We bowled over to the cupboard and I dived inside.
‘There’s probably a light,’ said Aysgarth as I floundered in the darkness. Thank heavens this place has a generator and we don’t have to rely on candles … ah, well done!’
I had found the light switch and was now surveying a jungle of mackintoshes, Wellington boots and bric-à-brac which stretched far back below the stairs. Ploughing forward I nearly disembowelled myself with a fishing-rod. ‘Bloody hell,’ I muttered before I remembered the Church. ‘Whoops! Sorry, Mr Dean –’
‘Oh, did you speak? I didn’t hear a word.’
The old pet! I adored him. Heaving aside a battalion of boots I struck gold in the form of six cases, all designed to carry records. ‘Eureka!’ I shouted, ripping open the first case of twelve-inch LPs, but found only the Beethoven symphonies with a dash of ‘Swan Lake’. Attacking the second case I glimpsed the word ‘Wagner’ and slammed shut the lid with a shudder.
‘Any luck?’ called Aysgarth excited.
‘Hang on.’ I opened the third case – and there, miraculously, was Presley, glittering in gold lamé and slouched in a pose to launch a thousand screams. ‘Whoopee!’ I yelled and staggered backwards past the macks and wellies with the record-case clasped to my bosom.
‘Jiminy cricket!’ said Aysgarth awed as I showed him the picture on the sleeve.
‘Just you wait, Mr Dean! This is the kind of stuff guaranteed to make the Bishop pass out in the pulpit!’
We plunged into the morning-room where I crammed the LP on to the turntable. Then I hesitated, holding the arm above the revolving disc as I tried to select the most suitable track. I didn’t want to bludgeon him into a coma with ‘Heartbreak Hotel’. A milder introduction seemed called for. Finally the decision was made, and the next moment Presley – Presley before he became decadent and bloated and corrupt – the young, unspoilt, unsurpassable Elvis Presley began to belt out ‘You’re Right, I’m Left, She’s Gone’.
VI
‘This is wonderful!’ cried the Dean. ‘Wonderful!’ And as I lifted the needle from the groove at the end of the track he exclaimed: ‘It makes me want to catch up with all the fun I missed out on in my youth!’
‘Was your youth really so drab?’
‘Drab! That’s an understatement. Primitive Methodists, no money, working day in, day out, in order to get on – why, the most thrilling moment of my youth consisted of a forbidden visit to the cinema where I watched Clara Bow oozing “It” as I sank my teeth into a sinful peppermint cream! Never mind, those times are gone now – and how glad I am that I’ve lived to see the dawn of a new era! Class barriers collapsing, sexual inhibitions being overcome –’
‘Good old Elvis! Want to hear some more?’
‘I want to hear everything! Play that song you were singing at dinner!’
I rummaged around and found it. ‘Okay, Mr Dean!’ I cried. “Off we go!’
The beat began to pound. Presley began to celebrate the joy of life. And suddenly Aysgarth rose to his feet.
‘Isn’t it great?’ I shouted, turning up the volume, but he merely cried enthralled: ‘Let’s dance!’
I kicked off my shoes, we grabbed each other’s hands, he drew me to the centre of the floor. And there, as Elvis Presley sang his heart out and the boards vibrated beneath our feet, I danced with the Dean of Starbridge to the beat of rock-’n’-roll.
VII
As the final chord throbbed and we clutched each other, breathless with laughter, I saw that Primrose and Eddie were standing appalled in the doorway.
‘Honestly!’ said Primrose as I abruptly switched off the radiogram. ‘I’ve never seen anything quite so undignified in all my life!’
‘My dear,’ said her father, ‘you mustn’t be so serious that you forget how to have fun.’
At once Primrose turned her back on us and stalked off across the hall.
‘Leave her to me, Stephen,’ said Eddie. ‘You go on having fun.’ And he too withdrew, closing the door behind him.
‘That’s the nicest thing Eddie’s done in a month of Sundays,’ I said. ‘But why on earth is Prim being so idiotic?’
‘I’m afraid she realised I was cross with her.’
‘Cross? That wasn’t being cross! You should hear my father when he roars like a lion – that’s what being cross is all about!’
‘But Primrose is particularly dependent on me for my love and approval. Ever since her mother died –’
‘But her mother’s been dead for over twenty years – isn’t it time Primrose grew up? God knows, I never thought I’d hear myself say this but sometimes when I see this so-called “dependence” on you I really feel quite sorry for Dido.’
He merely regarded me with grave blue eyes and said nothing.
A panic-stricken remorse assailed me. ‘Sorry,’ I mumbled, furious with myself for plunging around in his family problems like an elephant cavorting among eggshells. ‘Tight as an owl. Rude as hell. Forget I spoke.’
‘My dear Venetia, there’s no need for you to apologise!’ he said at once, sloughing off both my tactlessness and his problems as if they were supremely unimportant. ‘Let’s be tight as owls together and go on having the time of our lives!’ And as he stretched out his hands to me again I was suddenly transported to the very centre of life.
My world turned itself inside out. In a split second of blinding clarity I saw him at last not as the family friend who was always so kind to me, but as the irresistible stranger whose personality, by some great miracle, uniquely complemented my own. My loneliness was annihilated; my despair exploded into a euphoric hope. Knowing I had to withdraw at once before my emotion could utterly overwhelm me, I blundered across the hall to the cloakroom, sagged in tears against the door and mutely contemplated the vastness of my discovery.
VIII
‘Venetia?’
‘Just a sec.’ I pulled the plug of the lavatory and emerged dry-eyed into the hall. As I saw the anxious expression on his face I realised he thought I was suffering from the effects of too much to drink, but although I opened my mouth to reassure him no words came. I was speechless because his entire appearance had changed. His white hair now seemed not shop-soiled but creamily distinguished. His forehead had assumed exactly the right height and breadth to enhance this impression of distinction and his nose, formerly large, had become exquisitely and nobly Roman. The lines on his face no longer suggested antiquity but the power of a fascinating and formidable character. His eyes, radiantly blue and steamily bright, made me feel weak at the knees, while his thin mouth, which turned down slightly at the corners, no longer seemed tough in repose but overpoweringly sultry; I felt weaker at the knees than ever. In fact when he smiled I felt so demolished by his sheer sexual glamour that I actually had to sink down on the hall chest. I had forgotten he was sixty-one. Or, to be accurate, I had not forgotten but the fact no longer had any meaning for me. He could have been twenty-one, forty-one or eighty-one. Such a trivial fact was of no importance. All that mattered was that he was the man I wanted to go to bed with that very night and marry the very next morning.
I suddenly realised he was speaking again. He was saying: ‘How about some black coffee?’ and my voice was replying without a second’s hesitation: ‘I think I’d prefer a very large Rémy Martin.’
He laughed. Then reassured that I was no longer expiring from an excess of alcohol, he vanished into the dining-room to raid the sideboard.
‘What happened?’ he enquired with curiosity as he returned with two brandies and sat down beside me on the hall chest. ‘Were you overwhelmed by Mr Presley?’
‘No, by joie de vivre – and by you, Mr Dean,’ I said, somehow keeping my voice casual. ‘You must be the trendiest dean in Christendom!’
He laughed in delight, and I saw then that his attitude towards me was quite unchanged; untouched by any emotional earthquake he was merely savouring the concluding moments of an entertaining evening. ‘I always regard it as a very great blessing that Pip was born when I was fifty-two,’ he said. ‘He keeps me young in outlook.’
Primrose chose that moment to return to the hall. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to be such a kill-joy, but I genuinely can’t stand that sort of music.’
Aysgarth gave her a kiss to signal that her apology was accepted and asked: ‘Where’s Eddie?’
‘In the drawing-room. He started talking about the decadence of pop music and then before I could stop him he was holding forth on the decadence of Berlin in the ’thirties. I walked out when he began to ruminate on the nature of evil.’
‘I’d better go and rescue him.’
‘Why not just hit him over the head with The Brothers Karamazov? I nearly did.’
They wandered off together to save Eddie from his turgid metaphysics. Knocking back the rest of my brandy I reeled upstairs to my room and passed out in a stupor of alcohol, ecstasy and rampant sexual desire.
FIVE (#u1a2015f4-5a4f-576d-b3e6-9f4b56d41963)
‘The universe, like a human being, is not built merely to a mathematical formula. It’s only love that gives you the deepest due to it.’
JOHN A. T. ROBINSON
Suffragan Bishop of Woolwich 1959–1969
Writing about Honest to God in the Sunday Mirror, 7th April 1963
I
The next day was Sunday and Aysgarth had earlier mentioned that he would be celebrating Communion in the dining-room at eight. Since Eddie and Primrose would inevitably attend the service I had decided I should make the effort to join them, but when Primrose woke me I realised, as my hang-over hit me between the eyes, that my virtuous decision would have to be revoked.
‘There’s something so wonderfully moral about alcohol,’ observed Primrose as I pulled the bed-clothes over my head with a groan. ‘Punishment always follows excess.’
I could have murdered her, but by that time I was too enrapt with my memories of the previous evening to bother. She departed unscathed and immediately the door closed I sat up, ready for Day One of my new life. I tossed off the necessary potion to soothe my liver. Then I flung back the curtains and exclaimed: ‘A celestial day has dawned for Venetia Flaxton!’ Outside it was raining, but who cared? The view, wreathed in shifting mist, seemed more romantic than ever. Sliding back into bed I lit a cigarette, hummed a verse of Presley’s ‘I Need Your Love Tonight’ and prepared for a delicious hour of meditating on the object of my desire.
It was immediately obvious that I could never speak of my love. Since nothing could come of my grand passion there could be no conceivable point in disclosing my feelings, and besides, there was no one in whom I could confide – except Mrs Ashworth, but I could hardly babble to the wife of a bishop about my new-found adulterous lust for a dean.
Having reached this conclusion I perceived a second obvious truth: not only would I have to keep my mouth shut but I would have to rise to great thespian heights to conceal my secret. No one must ever guess the truth because no one would ever understand the height and breadth and depth of my well-nigh incinerating desire. I pictured my siblings sniggering: ‘Poor old Venetia! A crush on an elderly clergyman – whatever will she think of next?’ And as for Primrose … but no, the mind boggled. I had to carry the precious secret to my grave, but I could accept this necessity because I was so happy. I had been granted the power to love; nothing else mattered, and indeed to have wanted more would have been disgustingly greedy. Since it was quite impossible that Aysgarth could fall in love with me it was pointless to hope that my passion might be reciprocated, but I would be blissfully content with his continuing avuncular friendship, and so long as I could live near him, see him regularly and have the occasional little chat about God or Eternity or whatever else might interest him, my life would be indescribably rich and fulfilling.
So be it. I would still die virgo intacta, but having experienced passion on a cosmic scale I could at least tell myself that my years in the world hadn’t been a complete waste of time.
With a sigh I stretched myself luxuriously and decided I was in paradise.
II
My next task was to choose what to wear for Day One of my new life, but all my clothes now seemed so dreary, no more than a drab mass of browns, beiges and moss-greens. Then I remembered the red sweater which I had bought on impulse when I had visited Marks and Spencer’s to replenish my stock of underwear; I had just had a row with my father and was feeling aggressive, but now the scarlet seemed to symbolise not aggression but passion. I selected the sweater and eyed a pair of earth-coloured slacks. Did I dare wear trousers on a Sunday? Yes. I was in the mood to take a scandalous risk. My mother had brainwashed me into thinking slacks were vulgar on any day of the week, but I had long since realised they suited me. I have longish legs and not too much padding around the hips. It was true that I was usually at least seven pounds overweight, but we can’t all be the Duchess of Windsor.
I brushed my horrible hair and clipped it severely behind my ears to curb its tendency to billow around my head in a frizz. Then I slapped on some powder and went wild with the mascara which normally I reserved for evenings. My mother believed only fallen women wore eye make-up during the day, but Mrs Ashworth had confirmed my suspicion that this piece of folklore was out of date. I tried to recall whether Mrs Ashworth herself wore eye make-up but the memory eluded me. Dressing the part of a bishop’s wife, Mrs Ashworth was the kind of clever woman who would spend half an hour making herself up to look as if she was not made up at all.
Did I wear lipstick? No. Lipstick was going out of favour. The ‘look’ consisted of emphasising the eyes and hair. Jewellery? No, quite inappropriate for a Sunday morning in the Hebrides, and anyway I had decided to emulate Mrs Ashworth’s uncluttered simplicity of style. Was I ready? Yes. For anything. Forgetting my liver, which was still feeling a trifle battle-scarred, I sailed downstairs for breakfast just as the clock in the hall chimed nine.
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Susan Howatch
The author’s most famous and well-loved work, the Starbridge series, six self-contained yet interconnected novels that explore the history of the Church of England through the 20th century.In 1963, when traditional values are coming under attack, a young woman in her twenties, Venetia Flaxton, becomes disastrously involved with her best friend's father, the powerful, dynamic but ultimately mysterious Dean of Starbridge Cathedral. Yet, as a married man and a senior Churchman, Aysgarth has nothing to offer her but an admiration which spirals out of control into an obsessive love. As Aysgarth begins to take scandalous risks to further their friendship, pressures rise and the dangers multiply. Venetia finds herself trapped in a desperate web of love and lies from which it seems impossible to escape.Witty, compassionate and compelling, Scandalous Risks explores not only the reality of sin and the fantasy of sexual obsession, but the overpowering human need for redemption, love and lasting happiness.
Susan Howatch
SCANDALOUS RISKS
COPYRIGHT (#u1a2015f4-5a4f-576d-b3e6-9f4b56d41963)
This novel is entirely a work of fiction.The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
HARPER
A division of HarperCollins Publishers 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd 1990, then in paperback by Fontana 1991 and by HarperCollinsPublishers 1993
Copyright © Leaftree Ltd 1990
The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
Source ISBN: 978000739642
EBook Edition © JUNE 2012 ISBN: 9780007396412
Version: 2016-10-05
CONTENTS
COVER (#u9ded64ff-f19e-5c6f-af01-fdf6b711ed3c)
TITLE PAGE (#u1f7fa8fb-19e8-5a19-8617-23e47f3fea33)
COPYRIGHT
PART ONE
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
PART TWO
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
PART THREE
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
PART FOUR
ONE
TWO
KEEP READING (#litres_trial_promo)
AUTHOR’S NOTE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PRAISE
ALSO BY THE AUTHOR
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
PART ONE (#u1a2015f4-5a4f-576d-b3e6-9f4b56d41963)
THE GARDEN (#u1a2015f4-5a4f-576d-b3e6-9f4b56d41963)
‘For the true radical is not the man who wants to root out the tares from the wheat so as to make the Church perfect: it is only too easy on these lines to reform the Church into a walled garden. The true radical is the man who continually subjects the Church … to the claims of God in the increasingly non-religious world which the Church exists to serve.’
JOHN A. T. ROBINSON
Suffragan Bishop of Woolwich 1959–1969
Honest to God
ONE (#u1a2015f4-5a4f-576d-b3e6-9f4b56d41963)
‘We all need, more than anything else, to love and be loved.’
JOHN A. T. ROBINSON
Suffragan Bishop of Woolwich 1959–1969
Writing about Honest to God in the Sunday Mirror, 7th April 1963
I
I never meant to return to the scene of my great disaster. But one day, after yet another wasted weekend among alcoholic adulterers, I took a wrong turn on the motorway and saw the sign to Starbridge. Immediately I tried to escape. I drove up the next slip-road, but as I crossed the bridge to complete the U-turn I made the mistake of glancing south, and there, far away in the gap between the hills, I saw the spire of the Cathedral.
1988 dissolved into 1963. I glimpsed again my Garden of Eden, and as I hesitated at the wheel of my car, the rope of memory yanked me forward into the past. I forgot the U-turn, I forgot the motorway, I forgot my wasted weekend. On I drove to Starbridge along that well-remembered road which snaked between the hills before slithering to the floor of the valley, and ahead, appearing and disappearing with each twist of the road like some hypnotic mirage, the Cathedral grew steadily larger in the limpid summer light.
The city stood in the heart of the valley, but it was the Cathedral, eerie in its extreme beauty, which dominated the landscape, and as I stared at the spire I saw again that vanished world where the Beatles still had short hair, and skirts were yet to rise far above the knee and the senior men of the Church of England still dressed in archaic uniforms. Then as I remembered the Church in those last innocent days before the phrase ‘permissive society’ had been invented, I thought not only of those scandalous risks taken by Bishop John Robinson when he had written his best seller Honest to God, but of the scandalous risks taken by my Mr Dean as he had run his Cathedral and dallied with disaster and indulged in his dangerous dreams.
I reached the outskirts of the city.
It was very old. The Romans had built their city Starovinium on the site formerly occupied by the British tribe the Starobrigantes; the Anglo-Saxons had converted Starovinium into Starbrigga, a landmark in King Alfred’s Wessex; the Normans had recorded the town as Starbrige in Domesday Book, and Starbrige it had remained until the author of an eighteenth-century guidebook had fabricated the legend that the name was derived from the Norman bridge across the River Star. Starbridge then acquired its modern spelling, but the link with its remote origins lingered on in the Bishop’s official designation. In theory married to his diocese, he was entitled to use ‘Staro’ as his surname whenever he wrote his signature. I had no idea who the current bishop of Starbridge was, but I could remember the bishop of twenty-five years ago as clearly as I could remember the Cathedral’s dean.
I drove into the city but it was not as I had known it. Starbridge had been raped in the later years of the 1960s, like so many other dignified county towns. The new housing estates now stretched to the cemetery; there was a bypass, a shocking aberration on concrete stilts – how my Mr Dean would have hated that! – and in the oldest part of the town I found a one-way traffic system so baffling that I had to circle the market-place three times before I could find my way out. Then I got lost in the network of streets I had known so well, the streets around St Martin’s-in-Cripplegate. Butchers’ Alley was a pedestrian precinct; Chasuble Lane was blocked by a NO ENTRY sign. Completely confused I fled down Mitre Street only to find a hideous multi-storey car-park leering at me as I flashed by Marks and Spencer’s, but ahead I could see the traffic lights of Eternity Street and with relief I realised that the past was finally at hand. Seconds later, still swearing and sweating after my excursion in the maze, I was driving through the arched gateway into the Cathedral Close.
At once the constable on duty flagged me down. I was told that no parking was available unless I was calling on diocesan business or visiting a resident. I almost declared: ‘I’ve come to see the Dean!’ but somehow I hauled myself back to 1988, produced a five-pound note and said instead: ‘Would this do?’ The constable was deeply shocked. He said: ‘I’m afraid not, madam,’ and in rage I retired to the multi-storey car-park, but I felt cheered to learn that even now, in the heart of Mrs Thatcher’s England, there were still some things which were not for sale.
I left my Mercedes sulking by a down-market Ford and emerged from the car-park into a street which ran down to the Crusader Hotel. I was progressing at last. The Crusader faced St Anne’s Gate, the pedestrian entrance to the Cathedral precinct, and a minute later I was entering the huge walled enclosure of the Close.
The Cathedral rose from the lawn of the churchyard like a vast cliff towering upwards from a beach. The building still had the power to bring me gasping to a halt, but no sooner had I told myself that nothing had altered than I realised the place was awash with tourists. The Japanese, the Americans, the Germans, the French – all were on parade with their cameras and their guides, and amidst the flotillas of foreigners the English drifted idly, grey-haired ladies on outings, hikers with backpacks, even a bunch of teenage bores with beer cans, their ghetto-blasters silenced by the Constable of the Close. I was just marvelling at the diversity of these superfluous people when I became aware that they were united by their behaviour: they were all constantly looking up, and at last I looked up too; I looked beyond the slim windows, beyond the gargoyles, beyond the roof of the nave to the great cross which marked the summit of the spire.
That at least was unchanged.
But soon I felt the crowds were oppressive, and in the hope of escaping from them I tried to enter the Cathedral. The main doors of the west front were closed. So was the door in the north porch. Between the hours of ten and five, I discovered, all tourists were channelled through a side-door by the cloisters where turnstiles heralded a request for money. ‘It’s only a voluntary contribution, of course,’ said the dragon on duty at the cash-register. I flung her the five-pound note which the constable had refused. In shock she gabbled her thanks but I ignored her and stalked into the Cathedral.
It was infested with tourists. They swarmed and buzzed and hummed and clattered. Official guides droned. Cameras flashed illicitly. In horror I fled down the side-aisle of the nave and re-entered the cloisters by the door in the south transept, but even in that secluded quadrangle it proved impossible for me to be alone with my memories. A bevy of matrons declared that everything was ‘awesome’ and ‘wondrous’ and far better than that cathedral they had seen yesterday or was it the day before. Elbowing my way past them I tried to find the wooden seat where my Mr Dean and I had sat so often, but it had been removed. Tears stung my eyes. I felt I was engaged in an exercise of overpowering futility. My Garden of Eden had been ploughed under. Here I stood, in one of the greatest cathedrals in England, and it was no more than a Disneyland theme-park. God was absent. There was no whiff of holiness, no whisper of religion and not even a clergyman in sight.
But then I saw my clergyman. I glanced down the north colonnade at the moment that he entered the cloisters by the transept door. It was not my Mr Dean; he was long dead. It was the man I had labelled my Talisman. He recurred in my life. I thought of him as a portent, sometimes heralding disaster but often merely signifying change. Some years had elapsed since we had last met, but now here he was again, a tall thin man some five or six years my junior with straight brown hair and a strong-boned face. He was no longer wearing glasses but I recognised him at once. He had more trouble recognising me. I saw him look in my direction, glance away, then stop to look back. The tourists swarmed between us, but as he moved forward they automatically stepped aside to make way for him.
‘Venetia?’ he said amazed, and at once as I saw myself through his eyes I realised how odd my presence must have seemed. It was surely not often that a raddled wreck of a society woman was washed up on such a beautiful but polluted shore.
‘Hullo, soothsayer!’ I said, instinctively assuming a synthetic gaiety, although why I attempted to deceive him about my state of mind I have no idea. I should have realised that the passing years would only have heightened his intuitive powers.
‘This place is worse than Piccadilly Circus,’ he said, ignoring my pathetic attempt to be debonair. ‘Want to be rescued?’
‘Passionately.’
‘Follow me.’
With an unutterable relief I hurried after him as he led the way around the quadrangle. The door on the south side was marked PRIVATE but my Talisman, that human amulet who could achieve extraordinary results, ignored the sign and drew me into the stonemasons’ yard beyond the wall. Various workmen, engaged in the unending task of restoring the Cathedral’s fabric, were moving among the blocks of stone, but no one queried our presence. My companion’s clerical collar was no doubt sufficient to rebuff any thought of a challenge. On the far side of the yard we reached a second door. This one was marked CHOIR SCHOOL ONLY, but once again my Talisman, ignoring the sign, led me through the doorway into another world.
‘It’s the garden of the old episcopal palace,’ he said. ‘Ever been here?’
‘No.’ The palace had been ceded to the Choir School after the war, and by the time I had started moving among the ecclesiastical élite of Starbridge, the Bishop had lived in the house known as the South Canonry on the other side of the Close.
I suddenly realised there were no other human beings in sight. A silence broken only by bird-song enveloped us. The garden shimmered bewitchingly in the hot bright light.
‘Where are all the choirboys?’ I said, hardly able to believe such peace was not in imminent danger of destruction.
‘On holiday. Relax,’ said my Talisman, and led the way past a shrubbery to a newly-mown lawn which stretched to the river. Weeping willows trailed their branches in the water, and beyond the far bank meadows strewn with buttercups unfolded towards the hazy blue outline of the hills which surrounded the valley. The only building in sight was a farmhouse a mile away. Although we stood in the heart of Starbridge, nothing had changed on this flank of the city where the river looped around the mound on which the Cathedral stood. The water-meadows had been preserved as common land since the Middle Ages and protected in recent years by the National Trust.
As we sat down on a weathered bench by the water I said: ‘How clever of you to bring me to a place where the past survives intact!’
‘You were looking for the past?’
‘God knows what I was looking for.’
‘The past can survive in many forms,’ said my companion, ‘and unlike this beautiful view, not all those forms are benign.’
‘Quite. Hence the massive fees commanded by psychoanalysts.’
‘There are other liberators.’
‘Don’t you mean con-men?’
‘No, con-men can’t open the prison gates once the past has become a jail.’
‘No magic wand?’
‘No magic password.’
‘And what, may I ask, is the magic password of the true liberator?’
‘“Forgive”.’
The conversation ceased but the river glided on, the brilliant light glittering so fiercely on the water that my eyes began to ache. Looking away I saw that my right hand was gripping the arm of the seat. The paint on my fingernails was the colour of blood, and suddenly I saw myself as someone who had long suffered a debilitating haemorrhage but had abandoned all hope of a cure.
‘You’re wasting your time,’ I said. ‘I’m beyond liberation. Run away and liberate someone else.’ And then before I could stop myself I was exclaiming in despair: ‘I wish I’d never come back to this place! Usually I never even think of that bloody, bloody year –’
‘Which year?’
‘1963, but I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘That was the year of Honest to God, wasn’t it? I remember it well – and I remember you too, full of joie de vivre –’
‘Oh yes, that was me, oozing joie de vivre from every pore –’
‘So what went wrong?’
There was another silence before I answered: ‘Well, you see …’ But I was unable to finish the sentence. Then I said: ‘Well, to put the matter in a nutshell …’ But again I had to stop. It was only after yet another silence that I heard myself say in a voice devoid of emotion as I confessed the emotion I could never forget: ‘Well, the trouble was … I became so very, very fond of my darling Mr Dean.’
II
My Mr Dean had been christened Norman Neville and during the course of his career he had possessed various clerical titles, but I shall refer to him throughout this narrative by his surname, Aysgarth, because it was the one designation which never changed. He had left the name Norman behind in infancy when his mother decided to call him Neville, and he had left the name Neville behind in the 1940s when his ghastly second wife insisted on addressing him as Stephen; she had declared that the name Neville had been ruined by the unfortunate Mr Chamberlain, and that only a pure, noble, serious name such as Stephen could ever be good enough for the man she intended to marry. It had apparently never occurred to her that these dreary adjectives hardly did her husband justice, but Aysgarth, whose tolerance of his wife’s peculiarities bordered on the masochistic, had raised no objection to this despotic rechristening, and after his second marriage in 1945 the number of people who knew him as Neville had steadily declined.
‘If any woman tried to alter my name I’d put her in her place pretty damned quickly, I assure you!’ my father declared once to my mother when I was growing up, although in fact Aysgarth’s Christian name was irrelevant to him. My father was old-fashioned enough to call all men outside our family by their surnames, so although he and Aysgarth were close friends the relationship sounded more formal than it was. For years after their first meeting Aysgarth had addressed my father as ‘my Lord’ or ‘Lord Flaxton’, but in 1957 after Aysgarth received his great preferment my father had said to him: ‘Time to dispense with the title – address me as Flaxton in future.’ This invitation, so condescendingly delivered, was intended – and received – as a compliment. Indeed Aysgarth, who was the son of a failed Yorkshire draper, was so overcome that he blushed like a schoolboy.
‘Dear Mr Aysgarth!’ mused my mother long ago in the 1940s when I was still a child. ‘Not quite a gentleman, of course, but such a charming way with him at dinner-parties!’
My father and I first met Aysgarth on the same day in 1946. I was nine, my father was fifty-five and Aysgarth, then the Archdeacon of Starbridge, was forty-four. I had been sent home early from school after throwing an inkpot at some detestable girl who had called my father a ‘barmy peer’. I hated this local hell-hole and longed for a governess, but my father, whose idealism forced him to subscribe to the view that patricians should make efforts to mix with the plebeians, was resolute in sending all his daughters to school. The schools were private; my mother would certainly have balked at the prospect of her daughters being sacrificed on the altar of state education, so I never met the so-called ‘lower orders’, only the infamous middle classes who, I quickly learnt, considered it their mission in life to ‘take snooty, la-di-da pigs down a peg or two.’ If the middle classes hadn’t been so busy conquering the world for England in the nineteenth century I doubt if the upper classes would have survived into the twentieth.
‘You did quite right to throw the inkpot!’ said my father after I had defended my behaviour by telling him how he had been abused. ‘One can’t take insults lying down – I’ve no patience with Christians who waffle on about turning the other cheek!’
‘And talking of Christians,’ said my mother before my father could give his well-worn performance as an agnostic lion rampant, ‘don’t forget the Archdeacon’s calling on you this afternoon.’
‘What’s an archdeacon?’ I said, delighted that my father had supported me over the inkpot and anxious to retain his attention.
‘Look it up in the dictionary.’ He glanced at his watch, set me firmly aside and walked out.
I was skulking sulkily in the hall five minutes later when the doorbell rang and I decided to play the butler. I opened the front door. In the porch stood a short, broad-shouldered man who was dressed in a uniform which suggested an eccentric chauffeur. He had brown hair, rather bushy, and the kind of alert expression which one so often sees on the faces of gun-dogs. His eyes were a vivid blue.
‘All chauffeurs should go to the back entrance,’ I said, speaking grandly to conceal how unnerved I was by this curious apparition in gaiters.
‘I’m not a chauffeur – I’m an archdeacon,’ he said smiling at me, and asked my name. To put him to the test I answered poker-faced: ‘Vanilla,’ but he surmounted the challenge with ease. ‘How very charming and original!’ he exclaimed, not batting an eyelid, and told me I reminded him of Alice in Wonderland.
I was hardly able to believe that any adult could be so agreeable. ‘If I’m Alice,’ I said, testing him again to make sure I was not mistaken, ‘who are you?’
‘If you’re Alice, I think I’d like to be Lewis Carroll,’ said my future Mr Dean, exuding the charm which was to win my mother’s approval, and that was the moment when I knew for certain that he was my favourite kind of person, bright and sharp, quick and tough, yet kind enough to have time for a plain little girl with ink-stained fingers and an insufferable air of grandeur.
My father’s reaction to Aysgarth was startlingly similar to mine. ‘I like that man,’ he kept saying afterwards. ‘I like him.’ He sounded amazed. Hitherto he had regarded all clergymen as the victims of an intellectual aberration.
‘You’ll never believe this,’ said my mother that evening on the telephone to my elder brother in London, ‘but your father’s fallen violently in love with a clergyman – no, not the local parson who’s gone round the bend! Your father complained about the parson to the Bishop, and the Bishop sent the Archdeacon to investigate, and it’s the Archdeacon who’s won your father’s heart. Your father’s even saying he’s seen the Virgin Birth in a new light – he’s dreadfully unsettled, poor dear.’
This evidently alarmed my brother very much. Outraged squawks emerged from the telephone.
However the truth was that my father was neither suffering from the onset of senility nor undergoing a religious conversion. He was merely having to upgrade his opinion of clergymen because Aysgarth, an Oxford graduate, was one of those rare beings, my father’s intellectual equal. A clergyman who had won a first in theology could be dismissed; theology was not a subject which my father took seriously. But a clergyman who had been at Balliol, my father’s own college, and taken a first in Greats, that Olympian academic prize which even my father had had to toil to achieve – there indeed was a clergyman who defied dismissal.
‘I’ve come to the conclusion that Mr Aysgarth’s a great blessing,’ said my mother to me later. ‘Clever men like your papa become bored if they don’t have other clever men to talk to, so perhaps now he’s discovered Mr Aysgarth he won’t be such a crosspatch whenever he’s obliged to leave London and spend time at Flaxton Hall.’
I said: ‘If I read Greats up at Oxford, would Papa like me better?’
‘Darling, what a thing to say! Papa adores you – look how he stood up for you about the inkpot! Papa and I love all our children,’ said my mother vaguely, wandering away from me to attend to her plants in the conservatory, ‘and you’re a very lucky little girl to belong to such a happy family.’
I stood alone, staring after her, and wished I could be one of the exotic plants to which she paid so much devoted attention.
III
Aysgarth had a brother, who taught classics at a minor public school in Sussex, and a sister, who lived in the south London suburbs, but these siblings were rarely mentioned; he was fond of them but they had no place in the world he had carved out for himself since he had entered the Church. He had decided to be a clergyman when he was up at Oxford on his scholarship. This had been a brave decision, since he had had no money and no influential clerical connections, but Aysgarth was capable of great daring and possessed the iron nerves of a successful gambler.
‘Aysgarth may look the soul of propriety in his clerical uniform,’ my father remarked once to my mother, ‘but by God, he takes scandalous risks!’ My father often talked riskily, particularly when he succumbed to the childish urge to shock people he disliked, but in fact he lived a very conventional life for a man of his class. If he had been Aysgarth, obliged to make his own way in the world, he would have played safe, using the Oxford scholarship to follow an academic career. To enter the Church, where salaries were risible and worldly success for any self-made man was unlikely, would have struck my father as being reckless to the point of lunacy. Outwardly opposed to Christianity but inwardly attracted to the aspects which coincided with his own old-fashioned, sentimental liberal humanism, he was enthralled by the madcap idealism which seemed to him to characterise Aysgarth’s choice of a profession.
‘It was such a courageous step to take, Aysgarth!’
‘Nonsense! God called me to serve Him in the Church, so that was that. One doesn’t argue with God.’
‘But your intellect – surely you were obliged to give rational consideration to –’
‘What could be more rational than the decision to use my gifts in a way which would most clearly manifest my moral and intellectual convictions?’
My father was silent. Unable to risk believing in knowledge which his arrogant intellect deemed unknowable, he was speechless when confronted by Aysgarth’s act of faith. No rhetoric from an evangelist could have dented my father’s agnosticism, but Aysgarth, never speaking of Christianity unless my father raised the subject, presented the most powerful apologetic merely by revealing his life story. My father was baffled but respectful, disapproving yet filled with admiration.
‘But how did you have the nerve to marry when you were still a curate? Wasn’t that an absolutely scandalous risk for a penniless young man to take?’
‘I’d been engaged for seven years – wouldn’t it have been even more of a scandalous risk if I’d waited a day longer?’ retorted Aysgarth, and added to my mother as if he knew he could rely on her sympathy: ‘I regarded my first wife as the great prize which lay waiting for me at the end of my early struggles to get on in the world.’
‘So romantic!’ sighed my mother predictably.
‘Mr Aysgarth,’ I said, fascinated by his unembarrassed reference earlier in the conversation to the Deity whom my family felt it bad taste to discuss, ‘did God tell you to marry, just as He told you to be a clergyman?’
‘Be quiet, Venetia, and don’t interrupt,’ said my father irritably. ‘Sophie, why isn’t that child in bed?’
But my Mr Dean – my Mr Archdeacon as he was then – merely winked at me and said: ‘We might talk about God one day, Vanilla, if you’ve nothing better to do,’ and when both my parents demanded to know why he was addressing me as if I were an ice-cream, I realised with gratitude that he had diverted them from all thought of my bedtime.
According to various people who could remember her, Aysgarth’s first wife had been beautiful, intelligent, charming, religious and utterly devoted to her husband and children. Aysgarth seldom mentioned her but once when he said: ‘Grace was much too good for me,’ he sounded so abrupt that I realised any question about her would have exacerbated a grief which was still capable of being painfully recalled. The marriage had produced five children, four boys and a girl, Primrose, who was my age. The children were all either brilliantly clever or remarkably good-looking or, as in the case of Christian and Norman, both. James, the third son, was good-looking but not clever, and Alexander, the youngest, was clever but not good-looking. Primrose, who had a face like a horse, was brilliant and I became close friends with her, but I shall return to the subject of Primrose later.
Then in 1942 when Christian, the eldest, was fifteen and Alexander was little more than a baby, the first Mrs Aysgarth died and my Mr Archdeacon became entangled with the appalling creature who was to become his second wife. She was a society girl, famed for her eccentricities. Everyone declared that no woman could have been less suitable for a clergyman, but Aysgarth, bold as ever, ignored this judgement and lured his femme fatale to the altar soon after the end of the war. Everyone then proclaimed that the marriage would never last and he would be ruined, but ‘everyone’, for once, was wrong.
A year after the marriage came the vital meeting with my family. ‘All clergymen with balls should be encouraged!’ pronounced my father, and proceeded to throw his weight about at Westminster in an effort to win preferment for his new friend. Having devoted many years of his life to politics in the House of Lords my father was not without influence, and the Church of England, under the control of the Crown, was always vulnerable to the meddling of the Crown’s servants in the Lords and Commons. Usually the Church succeeded in going its own way without too much trouble, but although on ecclesiastical matters the Prime Minister took care to listen to the leading churchmen, he was not obliged to act on their advice. This situation occasionally reduced eminent clerics to apoplectic frenzy and led to chilly relations between Church and State.
Into this delicate constitutional minefield my father now charged, but fortunately it proved unnecessary for him to charge too hard because Aysgarth was well qualified for a choice promotion; he had been appointed archdeacon at an unusually early age after winning the attention of the famous Bishop Jardine who had romped around Starbridge in the 1930s. Jardine had retired before the war in order to swill port in Oxfordshire, and without a powerful benefactor a self-made man such as Aysgarth might well have languished in the provinces for the rest of his career, but he did have an excellent curriculum vitae and my father did have the urge to play God. In consequence Aysgarth’s transfer to London, where his talents could be fully displayed to the people who mattered, was hardly a big surprise.
‘If you’re an agnostic,’ I said to my father at one stage of his campaign, ‘why are you getting so mixed up with the Church?’
‘The Church of England,’ said my father grandly, ‘belongs to all Englishmen, even unbelievers. It’s a national institution which for moral reasons deserves to be encouraged, and never forget, Venetia, that although I’m an agnostic and even, in moments of despair, an atheist, I remain always an exceedingly moral man. This means, inter alia, that I consider it my absolute moral duty to ensure that the Church is run by the very best men available.’
‘So it’s all right for me to be interested in the Church, is it?’
‘Yes, but never forget that the existence of God can’t be scientifically proved.’
‘Can the non-existence of God be scientifically proved?’ I enquired with interest, but my father merely told me to run away and play.
Aysgarth was still too young to be considered for a bishopric or a deanery, and when it was agreed by the Church authorities that a little London grooming was necessary in order to eliminate all trace of his modest background, a benign Prime Minister offered him a canonry at Westminster Abbey – although not the canonry attached to St Margaret’s church where so many society weddings took place. (This disappointed my mother, who was busy marrying off her eldest daughter at the time.) The canon’s house in Little Cloister had been badly damaged by a bomb during the war, but by 1946 it had been repaired and soon Aysgarth’s frightful second wife had turned the place into a nouveau-riche imitation of a mansion in Mayfair.
I must name this woman. She had been christened Diana Dorothea but her acquaintances, even my father who shied away from Christian names, all referred to her as Dido despite the fact that they might be socially obliged to address her as ‘Mrs Aysgarth’. She was small, slim and smart; she dressed in a bold, striking style. Numerous falls from horses (the result of a mania for hunting) had bashed her face about so that she was ugly, but possibly she would have been ugly anyway. She always said exactly what she thought, a habit which regularly left a trail of devastation in her wake, and her wit – overrated, in my opinion – was as famous as her tactlessness. ‘Dido can always make me laugh,’ said my Mr Dean – my Canon, as he had now become. He was amazingly patient with her, always serene even when she was crashing around being monstrous, and his reward was her undisguised adoration. ‘Of course I could have married anyone,’ she declared carelessly once, ‘so wasn’t it too, too sweet of God to keep me single until I’d met darling Stephen?’
‘Is any further proof needed,’ muttered Primrose, ‘to demonstrate that God moves in mysterious ways?’
Primrose hated her stepmother.
‘Really, Primrose …’ Those syllables always heralded some intolerable remark. ‘Really, Primrose, I can’t understand why you don’t invest in some padded bras. I certainly would if I was unfortunate enough to have your figure …’ ‘Really, Primrose, we must do something about your clothes! No wonder no man asks you out when you look like someone from a DP camp …’ ‘Really, Primrose, you must try not to be so possessive with your father – possessiveness, I’ve always thought, is inevitably the product of a low, limited little nature …’
‘If she were my stepmother,’ I said to Primrose after witnessing one of these verbal assaults, ‘I’d murder her.’
‘Only the thought of the gallows deters me,’ said Primrose, but in fact it was her love for her father that drove her to endure Dido.
Aysgarth wound up fathering five children in his second marriage, but three died either before or shortly after birth and only a boy and a girl survived. Elizabeth was a little monster, just like her mother, but Philip was placid and gentle with an affectionate nature. Not even Primrose could object to little Pip, but she had a very jaundiced opinion of Elizabeth who would scramble up on to her father’s knees, fling her arms around his neck and demand his attention at every opportunity. Aysgarth complicated the situation by being far too indulgent with her, but Aysgarth was incapable of being anything but indulgent with little girls.
My father had naively thought that once Aysgarth was ensconced in the vital Westminster canonry peace would reign until the inevitable major preferment materialised, but before long Aysgarth’s reckless streak got the better of him and he was again taking scandalous risks. Having run a large archdeaconry he quickly became bored with his canonry, and as soon as he had mastered the intricacies of Abbey politics he decided to seek new worlds to conquer in his spare time. He then got mixed up with Bishop Bell of Chichester, a remarkable but controversial celebrity who was always tinkering with international brotherhood and ecumenism and other idealistic notions which the more earthbound politicians at Westminster dubbed ‘hogwash’. The most dangerous fact about Bishop Bell, however, was not that he peddled hogwash from the episcopal bench in the House of Lords, but that he was loathed by Mr Churchill, and as the Labour Government tottered in slow motion towards defeat, it became increasingly obvious that Mr Churchill would again become Prime Minister.
‘Think of your future, Aysgarth!’ implored my father. ‘It’s death to get on the wrong side of these politicians!’
‘Then I must die!’ said Aysgarth cheerfully. ‘I refuse to be an ecclesiastical poodle.’
‘But if you want to be a bishop or a dean –’
‘All I want is to serve God. Nothing else matters.’
My father groaned and buried his face in his hands.
‘What’s the difference between a bishop and a dean?’ I demanded, taking advantage of his speechlessness to plunge into the conversation, and Aysgarth answered: ‘A dean is the man in charge of a cathedral. A bishop is the man in charge of a diocese, which is like a county – a large area which contains in addition to the cathedral a number of churches all with their own parishes. A bishop has a special throne, his cathedra, in the cathedral and sometimes he goes there to worship, but often he’s looking after his flock by attending services all over the diocese.’
‘It’s as if the bishop’s the chairman of the board of a group of companies,’ said my father morosely, ‘and the dean is the managing director of the largest company. Aysgarth, how I wish you’d never got involved with that POW camp on Starbury Plain during the war! I can quite see how useful you are to Bell when he needs someone to liaise with the German churches, but if you want to avoid antagonising Churchill you’ve got no choice: you must wash your hands of all those damned Huns without delay.’
‘I’m a disciple of Jesus Christ, not Pontius Pilate!’ said Aysgarth laughing. ‘Don’t talk to me of washing hands!’ And when my father finally laughed too, I thought what a hero Aysgarth was, unintimidated by my formidable father, unintimidated by the even more formidable Mr Churchill, and determined, like the star of a Hollywood western, to stand up for what he believed to be right.
However, real life is far less predictable than a Hollywood western, and contrary to what my father had supposed, Aysgarth’s work with the Germans failed to result in a lethal confrontation with Mr Churchill as the clock struck high noon. Bishop Bell was undergoing that metamorphosis which time so often works on people once judged controversial, and in the 1950s he became so hallowed that any hand-picked confederate of his could hardly fail to acquire a sheen of distinction. With Bell’s patronage Aysgarth became renowned as an expert on Anglo-German church relations. He formed the Anglo-German Churchmen’s Society; he raised funds to enable German refugees in England to train for the priesthood; he kept in touch with the numerous German POWs to whom he had once ministered in the Starbridge diocese. Like Bell, Aysgarth had been uncompromisingly opposed to Nazism, but he saw his post-war work with the Germans as a chance to exercise a Christian ministry of reconciliation, and in the end it was this ministry, not his canonry at Westminster, which in the eyes of the senior churchmen made him very much more than just a youthful ex-archdeacon from the provinces.
‘It was a terrible risk to mess around with all those damned Huns,’ said my father, ‘but he’s got away with it.’ And indeed Aysgarth’s failure, once he turned fifty, to receive his big preferment lay not in the fact that he had aligned himself with the pro-German Bishop Bell; it lay in the fact that he had a disastrous wife.
Dido prided herself on being a successful hostess. Her dinner-parties were patronised by an astonishing range of distinguished guests who enjoyed her eccentric remarks, but clerical wives are hardly supposed to toss off letters to the newspapers on controversial issues or make withering remarks about the Mothers’ Union during an interview with a women’s magazine. The press were rapidly enthralled with appalling results. Dido stopped giving interviews but could seldom resist a tart comment on any matter of public interest. (‘What do you think of the conquest of Everest, Mrs Aysgarth?’ Thank God someone’s finally done it – I’m bored to death with the wretched molehill!’ ‘Do you believe in capital punishment, Mrs Aysgarth?’ ‘Certainly! Flog ’em and hang ’em – and why not crucify ’em too? What was good enough for Our Lord ought to be good enough for mass-murderers!’ ‘What do you think of the Suez crisis, Mrs Aysgarth?’ ‘The Archbishop of Canterbury should declare that the entire disaster is a Moslem plot to humiliate a Christian country, and all the soldiers going to the Canal should wear crosses, like the Crusaders!’)
‘Aysgarth will never receive preferment now,’ said my father in deepest gloom after the Suez comment had been plastered over William Hickey’s Diary in the Daily Express. ‘How could that woman ever be a bishop’s wife? She’d outrage everyone in no time.’
Hating to abandon hope I said: ‘Could he still be a dean?’
‘Perhaps in one of the minor cathedrals a long way from London.’
‘Dido will never leave London except for Canterbury or York,’ said my mother dryly, but she was wrong. Late in 1956 after the Suez crisis had reached its catastrophic conclusion, Dido gave birth to her fifth and final child, a stillborn boy, and promptly lapsed into a nervous breakdown. From time to time in the past she had suffered from nervous exhaustion, but this episode was so severe that she was completely disabled. She had to spend a month in an establishment which was tactfully referred to as a convalescent home, and even when she emerged she could do no more than lie in bed in a darkened room.
‘I think she fancies herself as Camille,’ said Primrose. ‘I’m just waiting for the first little consumptive cough.’
‘Maybe she’ll commit suicide,’ I suggested.
‘Not a hope. That sort never does. Too damn selfish.’
The day after this conversation Aysgarth turned up on the doorstep of our London home in Lord North Street, a stone’s throw from Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament. My mother was out at a charity coffee-party, my father was downstairs in his study and I was lolling on the sofa in the first-floor drawing-room as I reread Middlemarch. By this time I was almost twenty and had recently returned with relief to England after enduring weeks of exile with family friends in Florence.
When I heard the doorbell I laid aside my book and padded out on to the landing. In the hall below me the butler had just opened the front door and Aysgarth was saying: ‘Lord Flaxton’s expecting me,’ but from the tone of his voice I realised I should abstain from cascading down the stairs to offer him an exuberant welcome. I paused, keeping well back from the banisters. Then as soon as the hall was empty I sped noiselessly down the staircase and pressed my ear to the door of my father’s study.
‘… and since you’ve always taken such an interest in my career,’ I heard Aysgarth say, ‘I thought you should be the first to know that I have to leave London. There’s no choice. Dido’s health demands it.’
My father at once became apoplectic with horror. I too was horrified but I did rouse myself sufficiently to check that my eavesdropping was unobserved. Fortunately a gossipy drone rising from the basement indicated that the servants had paused for elevenses. With confidence I returned my ear to the panel.
‘… and now that I’ve spoken to the psychiatrist,’ Aysgarth was saying, ‘I can clearly see that she needs to make a completely fresh start somewhere else. The tragedy is that back in 1946 she so desperately wanted to come to London because she felt that here she could play a major part in advancing my career. The present situation – and of course we all know my career’s ground to a halt – is very hard for her to bear.’
‘Quite. But nonetheless –’
‘The death of the baby was the last straw. Dido now feels she’s a failure at everything she undertakes in this city, and she’s convinced that she has no chance of happiness until she leaves it.’
‘But Aysgarth,’ said my father, trying to mask his despair by assuming a truly phenomenal gentleness, ‘that’s all very well for Dido, but what about you?’
‘I couldn’t live with myself unless I’d done everything in my power to make Dido feel successful and happy.’
There was a silence while my father and I boggled at this extraordinary statement. I was too young then to feel anything but a massive outrage that he should be acquiescing without complaint in the wrecking of his career, and it was only years later that I realised this was my first glimpse of the mystery which lay at the heart of his marriage.
‘It’s clear to me that I’m not meant to move any further up the ecclesiastical ladder,’ said Aysgarth at last when my father remained silent, ‘and I accept that. I confess I’d be happy to stay on in London and devote myself to my German interests, but obviously it’s time for my life to take a new turn.’
My father managed to say in a voice devoid of emotion: ‘I’ll see what I can do about a Crown appointment.’
‘That’s more than good of you, but quite honestly I think you’d be wasting your time if you tried to pull strings in Downing Street. I’m sure I must have the letters “W.I.” against my name in the clerical files.’
‘“W.I.”?’
‘“Wife Impossible”.’
‘Ah.’ There was a pause. Obviously my father was so appalled that he needed several seconds to frame his next question. It was: ‘Surely Bell can do something for you?’
‘Unfortunately no canonry’s likely to fall vacant at Chichester at the moment, and apart from Chichester Bell’s influence is mostly abroad – which is no use to me, since Dido couldn’t possibly cope with the stress of living in a foreign country. I’ll talk to Bell, of course, but –’
‘If he can’t produce anything suitable, Aysgarth, I believe your best bet would be to go straight to the top and talk to the Archbishop of Canterbury.’
‘He’s been implacably opposed to Dido ever since she criticised the hat Mrs Fisher wore at the Coronation.’
‘Oh God, I’d forgotten that disaster! All right, pass over Fisher. What about the Bishop of London?’
‘He’s fairly new and I still don’t know him well.’
‘In that case you must approach his predecessor. Dr Wand’s not dead yet, is he?’
‘No, but I have a fatal knack of alienating Anglo-Catholics.’
‘Then your Dean at Westminster –’
‘He’s been cool towards me for some time. I’ve been paying too much attention to my international concerns and not giving enough time to the Abbey.’
‘But there must be someone who can rescue you!’ said my father outraged. ‘I thought Christians were supposed to be famous for their brotherly love!’
Aysgarth somehow produced a laugh but before he could reply my father said suddenly: ‘What about your old diocese? Can you approach the Bishop of Starbridge?’
‘He’s another man I don’t know well. You’re forgetting that I left Starbridge before he was appointed.’
‘But I know him,’ said my father, who was one of the largest landowners in the Starbridge diocese. ‘He’s a dry old stick but we’re on good terms. Just you leave this to me, Aysgarth, and I’ll see what I can do …
IV
Neither my father nor Aysgarth hoped for more than a canonry, and both of them were aware how unlikely it was that any choice position would fall vacant at the right moment, but within twenty-four hours of their secret conference the Dean of Starbridge suffered a stroke and it was clear he would be obliged to retire. At once my father plunged into action. The deanery was a Crown appointment, but my father, undeterred by the thought of those hideous letters ‘W.I.’ in Aysgarth’s file, started swamping the Prime Minister’s clerical advisers with claret at the Athenaeum. He was helped by having an eligible candidate to promote: Aysgarth knew Starbridge well from his years as Archdeacon, and as a first-class administrator he was more than capable of running one of the greatest cathedrals in England. My father beavered away optimistically only to be appalled when the Prime Minister admitted to him during a chance encounter at the Palace of Westminster that since the deanery was such an important appointment he intended to let Archbishop Fisher have the last word.
‘Oh my God!’ I said in despair when my father broke the news. By this time I had insinuated myself into the crisis so successfully that my father was taking the unprecedented step of treating me as his confidante. ‘Mrs Fisher’s Coronation hat!’
‘If Aysgarth fails to get that deanery,’ said my father, ‘just because Dido made a catty remark about a hat –’
‘We can’t let it happen, Papa, we simply can’t – Fisher must be tamed.’ It was now 1957 and the entire summer stretched before us. ‘Is he interested in racing?’ I demanded feverishly. ‘We could offer him our box at Ascot. Or what about tennis? We could offer him our debenture seats for the Wimbledon fortnight. Or cricket – you could invite him to the Pavilion at Lords –’
‘My dear girl, Fisher’s hardly the man to be swayed by mere frivolities!’
‘Then what’s his ruling passion in life?’
‘Canon law.’
The problem seemed insuperable.
After a pause during which we racked our brains for inspiration I asked: ‘Who, technically, has the power to overrule the Archbishop of Canterbury?’
‘The Queen and God. I mean, the Queen. I really can’t start believing in God at my age –’
‘Never mind God, let’s concentrate on the Queen. Why don’t you pull a string at the Palace?’
‘What string? I don’t have a string – you know very well that I’ve never been the courtier type!’
‘Now look here, Papa: are you a peer of the realm or aren’t you?’
‘I’m beginning to feel like the inhabitant of a lunatic asylum. Venetia, the Queen would only refer the matter back to the Prime Minister, and since we already know Macmillan’s determined to pass the buck to Fisher –’
‘Then we’ve just got to conquer that Archbishop. Let’s think again. He’s an ex-headmaster, isn’t he? If you were to invite him to dinner with the headmaster of Eton and throw in the Bishop of Starbridge for good measure –’
‘This has all come to pass because back in 1945 Aysgarth married that bloody woman!’ exclaimed my father, finally giving way to his rage. ‘Why on earth did he marry her? That’s what I’d like to know! Why on earth did he do it?’
It was a question I was to ask myself many times in the years to come.
V
Our fevered plotting resulted in my father’s decision to give a little all-male dinner-party at the House of Lords. This made me very cross as I had planned to charm the Archbishop by begging him to tell me all about his life as headmaster of Repton, but my father merely said: ‘Women should keep out of this sort of business. Why don’t you start training for a decent job instead of loafing around smoking those disgusting cigarettes and reading George Eliot? If you’d gone up to Oxford –’
‘What good’s Oxford to me when all public school Englishmen run fifty miles from any woman who’s mad enough to disclose she has a brain bigger than a pea?’
‘There’s more to life than the opposite sex!’
‘It’s easy for you to say that – you’re tottering towards your sixty-sixth birthday!’
‘Tottering? I never totter – how dare you accuse me of senility!’
‘If you can spend your time making monstrous statements, why shouldn’t I follow your example?’
My father and I had this kind of row with monotonous regularity; I had long since discovered that this was an infallible way of gaining his attention. The rows had now become stylised. After the ritual door-slamming my long-suffering mother was permitted to play the peacemaker and bring us together again.
However on this occasion events failed to follow their usual course because before my mother could intervene my father took the unprecedented step of initiating the reconciliation. He did it by pretending the row had never happened. When I returned to the house after a furious walk around St James’s Park he immediately surged out of his study to waylay me.
‘Guess what’s happened!’
‘The Archbishop’s dropped dead.’
‘My God, that’s close! But no, unfortunately the dead man’s not Fisher. It’s the Bishop of Starbridge.’
I was appalled. ‘Our best ally!’
‘Our only hope! I feel ready to cut my throat.’
‘Well, pass me the razor when you’ve finished with it.’
We decided we had to be fortified by sherry. My mother was out, attending a meeting of the WVS. In the distance Big Ben was striking noon.
‘What the devil do I do now?’ said my father as we subsided with our glasses on the drawing-room sofa. ‘I can’t face Fisher without Staro on hand to make his speech about how well Aysgarth ran the archdeaconry back in the ’forties. In Fisher’s eyes I’m just a non-church-goer. I was absolutely relying on Staro to wheel on the big ecclesiastical guns.’
‘Personally,’ I said, ‘I think it’s time God intervened.’
‘Don’t talk to me of God! What a bungler He is – if He exists – collecting Staro at exactly the wrong moment! If Aysgarth ever gets that deanery now it’ll be nothing short of a miracle, and since I don’t believe in miracles and since I strongly suspect that God is an anthropomorphic fantasy conjured up by mankind’s imagination –’
The doorbell rang.
‘Damn it,’ muttered my father. ‘Why didn’t I tell Pond I wasn’t at home to callers?’
We waited. Eventually the butler plodded upstairs to announce: ‘Canon Aysgarth’s here, my Lord.’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake show him up!’ said my father crossly. ‘You know I’m always at home to Mr Aysgarth!’
Pond retired. My father was just pouring some sherry into a third glass when Aysgarth walked into the room.
‘Sit down, my dear fellow,’ said my father, ‘and have a drink. I assume you’ve heard the disastrous news.’
‘Abandon your sherry!’ said Aysgarth. ‘Send for the champagne!’
We gaped at him. His eyes sparkled. His smile was radiant. He was euphoric.
In amazement my father exclaimed: ‘What on earth’s happened?’
‘Fisher summoned me to Lambeth Palace this morning. He said: “Let’s forget all the nonsense those women stirred up. We can’t let the Church suffer in 1957 just because my wife wore a certain hat in 1953.”’
My father and I both gasped but Aysgarth, now speaking very rapidly, gave us no chance to interrupt him. ‘“Starbridge is suddenly without either a bishop or a dean,” said Fisher, “and both the Cathedral and the diocese have problems which need solving urgently by the best men available –“‘
‘My God!’ said my father.
‘My God!’ said my voice at exactly the same moment. I had a vague picture of an anthropomorphic deity smiling smugly in a nest of clouds.
‘He offered me the deanery,’ said Aysgarth. ‘By that time, of course, I was almost unconscious with amazement, but I did somehow manage to open my mouth and say “thank you”.’
For a moment my father was silent, and when he was finally able to speak he could produce only a Latin tag. It was an emotional: ‘Fiat justitia!’
Aysgarth tried to reply and failed. Mutely they shook hands. Englishmen really are extraordinary in their ruthless pursuit of the stiff upper lip. If those men had belonged to any other race they would no doubt have slobbered happily over each other for some time.
‘Venetia,’ said my father at last, somehow achieving a casual tone, ‘ring the bell and we’ll ask Pond to conjure up the Veuve Clicquot.’
But I ignored him. Taking advantage of the fact that women were permitted to be demonstrative in exceptional circumstances, I exclaimed to Aysgarth for the first time in my life: ‘My darling Mr Dean!’ and impulsively slipped my arms around his neck to give him a kiss.
‘Really, Venetia!’ said my father annoyed. ‘Young women can’t run around giving unsolicited hugs to clergymen! What a way to behave!’
But my Mr Dean said: ‘If there were more unsolicited hugs in the world a clergyman’s lot would be a happier one!’ And to me he added simply, ‘Thank you, Venetia. God bless you.’
In ecstasy I rang the bell for champagne.
TWO (#u1a2015f4-5a4f-576d-b3e6-9f4b56d41963)
‘We need to be accepted as persons, as whole persons, for our own sake.’
JOHN A. T. ROBINSON
Suffragan Bishop of Woolwich 1959–1969
Writing about Honest to God in the Sunday Mirror, 7th April 1963
I
Aysgarth drank quite a bit. Not quite a lot. But quite a bit. There’s a difference. ‘Quite a lot’ means serious drinking twice a day. ‘Quite a bit’ means serious drinking occasionally and moderate drinking in between. Aysgarth was apparently the kind of drinker who seldom touched alcohol during the day but who regularly had a couple of whiskies at six o’clock. If he went to a dinner-party later he would then drink a glass of sherry before the meal, a couple of glasses of wine with the food and a hefty measure of port once the cloth was drawn. This was by no means considered a remarkable consumption in the political circles in which my father moved, and probably the upper reaches of London ecclesiastical society also regarded such drinking habits as far from excessive, yet by 1957 my father was afraid a rumour might circulate that Aysgarth was a secret drinker.
‘He keeps his bottle of whisky behind the Oxford Dictionary in his study!’ my father said scandalised to my mother after this eccentricity had been innocently revealed to him. ‘What a risk to take! He’s paying lip-service, of course, to the tradition that clergymen shouldn’t indulge in spirits, but what are the servants going to think when they discover the clandestine bottle? He’d do better to keep it openly on the sideboard!’
‘Since Mr Aysgarth hasn’t had a lifetime’s experience of dealing with servants,’ said my mother delicately, ‘perhaps he thinks they won’t find out about the bottle.’
‘I disillusioned him, I assure you, but he didn’t turn a hair. “I’m not a drunk and my conscience is clear!” he declared, not believing a word I said, and he even had the nerve to add: “‘Honi soit qui mal y pense’!” He’s quite incorrigible.’
My father also disapproved of Aysgarth’s occasional trick of drinking too fast. On that day in 1957 as we celebrated the offer of the Starbridge deanery, he downed three glasses of champagne in a series of thirsty gulps and sighed as if longing for more. It was not offered to him. ‘Fancy drinking champagne like that!’ said my father shocked to me afterwards. ‘No breeding, of course. Not brought up to drink champagne properly.’
I opened my mouth to remind him of his blue-blooded friends who regularly consumed champagne as if it were lemonade, but then I decided not to argue. I was in too good a mood. Instead I merely proffered the opinion that Aysgarth was more than entitled to a quick swill after enduring his wife’s nervous breakdown and the agonising worry over his future.
I was still savouring my relief that the crisis had ended when I learnt that a new cloud had dawned on the ecclesiastical horizon. Calling on us the next day Aysgarth confessed his fear that an old adversary of his might be appointed bishop of Starbridge.
It was six o’clock. (Aysgarth always timed his visits to coincide with the possibility of refreshment.) My mother was attending a committee meeting of the Royal Society of Rose-Growers. Once again my father and I joined forces to support our harassed cleric.
‘Have a whisky, my dear fellow,’ said my father kindly. ‘We’ll pretend you’re not wearing your clerical collar and can drink spirits with a clear conscience. Who’s this monster who might be offered the bishopric?’
‘Oh, he’s no monster!’ said Aysgarth hastily, sinking into the nearest armchair as my father added soda-water to a shot of scotch. ‘He’s just someone I’d be happy never to meet again.’ ‘Your sworn enemy!’ I said, reading between the Christian lines.
‘Don’t be facetious, Venetia,’ said my father. ‘This is serious. Do you have no power of veto, Aysgarth? Surely the Dean and Chapter are always consulted about the appointment of a new bishop?’
‘Unofficially, yes, but officially we have to take the card we’re dealt – and bearing in mind the fact that I’ve only just won the deanery by the skin of my teeth I’m hardly in a position to raise even an informal objection to this man.’
‘But who on earth is he, for God’s sake?’
‘The rumour bouncing off the walls of Church House,’ said Aysgarth after a huge gulp of whisky, ‘is that Charles Ashworth’s been approached for the job.’
‘Oh, him! In that case you’ve nothing to worry about. He’ll never take it.’
‘I know he’s already turned down two bishoprics, but this could be the one bishopric he’s unable to refuse. He’d rank alongside the bishops of London, Durham and Winchester – there’d be a seat available immediately in the House of Lords – he’d be only ninety minutes by train from the centres of power in the capital – and as if all these advantages weren’t sufficient to seduce him, he’d have the challenge of pulling the Theological College together, and he’s an expert on theological education.’
‘I’ve never heard of this man,’ I said. ‘Where’s he been hiding himself? What’s he like?’
‘Oh, he’s the most charming fellow!’ said my father with enthusiasm. ‘Very keen on cricket. A first-class brain. And he’s got a nice little wife too, really a very nice little wife, one of those little women who listen so beautifully that they always make a man feel ten feet tall –’
‘The Reverend Dr Charles Ashworth,’ said Aysgarth, ignoring this sentimental drivel as he responded to my demand for information, ‘is Lyttelton Professor of Divinity at Cambridge and a Canon of Cambridge Cathedral.’
‘So what’s wrong with him?’
‘Nothing. We’re just temperamentally incompatible and theologically in different camps.’
‘Maybe he’ll turn down the job after all!’ I said brightly after we had all observed a moment of heavy silence. ‘Why did he turn down the previous bishoprics?’
My father commented: ‘Being a bishop isn’t every clergyman’s idea of heaven,’ and Aysgarth said: ‘Ashworth preferred life in his academic ivory tower.’ However as soon as this statement had been made he modified it by adding rapidly: ‘No, I shouldn’t say that. Ashworth came down from his ivory tower in ‘thirty-nine when he volunteered to be an army chaplain. That was something I never did. Then he was a prisoner of war for three years. I never had to endure that either. After the war he did return to academic life but not, I’m sure, because he wanted to escape from the world. He must have felt genuinely called to resume his career of writing and teaching, and I’m sure this call is why he’s turned down the previous bishoprics.’
‘So why should his call now change?’
‘Because the offer’s alluring enough to make him wonder if God might have other plans for him.’
‘Let’s get this quite straight, Aysgarth,’ said my father, always anxious to eliminate God from any conversation. ‘Have you actually had a row with this man or is this just a case of polite mutual antipathy?’
‘In 1946,’ said Aysgarth, ‘we had such a row that he smashed his glass in the fireplace and stormed out of the room.’
‘Impossible!’ said my father, balking at the thought of a clergyman behaving like a Cossack. ‘Ashworth’s such a charmer! What on earth was the row about?’
‘The theology of redemption and the theology of the Incarnation.’
‘Impossible!’ said my father again. ‘Two highly intelligent men going berserk over theology—of all subjects! No, no, Aysgarth, I refuse to believe it, you must be romancing!’
‘I assure you I’m not – although to be fair to Ashworth,’ said Aysgarth with an effort, ‘I should explain that at the time he was obviously still suffering from his experiences as a POW.’
Unable to restrain my curiosity I asked: ‘What exactly do you mean when you talk about the theology of redemption and the theology of the Incarnation?’ but my father at once cried imperiously: ‘Stop!’ and held up his hand. ‘I refuse to allow theology to be discussed in my drawing-room,’ he declared. ‘I value my collection of glasses too highly. Now Aysgarth, I’m sure you’re worrying unnecessarily. Ashworth’s not going to bear you a grudge just because you once drove him to behave like a hooligan during some bizarre tiff, and besides, you’re now both such distinguished Christian gentlemen! If you do indeed wind up living in the same cathedral close, then of course you’ll both have no trouble drawing a veil over the past and being civil to each other.’
‘Of course,’ said Aysgarth blandly, but he downed the rest of his scotch as if he still needed to drown his dread.
II
The appointments were eventually announced within a week of each other in The Times. Ashworth did accept the bishopric, although it was whispered on the Athenaeum’s grapevine that he nearly expired with the strain of making up his mind.
‘I think I must now give a little men-only dinner-party for him and Aysgarth at the House of Lords,’ said my father busily to my mother. ‘It might be helpful in breaking the ice if they met again in a plain, simple setting without a crucifix in sight.’
‘Anything less plain and simple than that baroque bastion of privilege would be hard to imagine,’ I said, furious at this new attempt to relegate me to the side-lines, ‘and why do you always want to exclude women from your dinner-parties?’
‘Don’t speak to your father in that tone of voice, please, Venetia,’ said my mother casually without pausing to glance aside from the flowers she was arranging. ‘Ranulph, you needn’t be afraid to hold the dinner-party here; Dido won’t come. When I telephoned yesterday to enquire how she was, her companion said she was still accepting no invitations.’
‘And besides,’ I said, turning over a page of Punch, ‘if you stick to your misogynist principles, you won’t be able to ogle that “nice little wife” of Professor Ashworth’s at the dinner-party.’
‘Nice little wife?’ echoed my mother, sufficiently startled to forget her flower arrangement and face us. ‘Well, I’ve only met her a couple of times at dinner-parties, but I thought she was tough as nails, the sort of chairwoman who would say to her committee: “I’m so glad we’re all in agreement,” and then effortlessly impose her views on the dissenting majority!’
‘For God’s sake let’s have both Ashworths to dinner as soon as possible,’ I said, tossing Punch aside. ‘I can’t wait.’
The dinner took place a fortnight later.
III
My mother invited Primrose to accompany her father to the dinner-party, and she also extended an invitation to Aysgarth’s third son, James, who was stationed with his regiment in London. Any young man in the Guards who can look dashing on horseback in a glamorous uniform will always be popular with mothers of unmarried daughters, but twenty-four-year-old males with the cultural limitations of a mollusc have never struck me as being in the least amusing.
‘I wish you’d invited Christian and Norman as well as James,’ I grumbled, but my mother said she had to avoid swamping the Ashworths with Aysgarths. The Ashworths did have two teenage sons but at the time of the dinner-party Charley was doing his National Service and Michael was away at school.
I regretted being deprived of Christian; like every girl I knew I had gone through a phase of being madly in love with Aysgarth’s eldest son, and although I had by this time recovered from my secret and wholly unreciprocated passion for this masculine phenomenon who looked like a film star and talked like a genius, a secret hankering for him lingered on.
Meanwhile, as I hankered in vain for Christian’s presence at the dinner-party, my mother was obliged to add to the guest-list my brother Harold, an amiable nonentity, and his wife Amanda, an expensive clothes-horse. They were in London on holiday but would eventually return to Turkey where Harold had a job shuffling papers at the British Embassy and the clothes-horse fulfilled her vocation to be ornamental. Their combined IQ was low enough to lay a pall over any dinner-party, and to make matters worse my other brother – the one who on his good days could be described as no genius but no fool – had to speak in an important debate, a commitment which excluded him from the guest-list. Oliver, the Member of Parliament for Flaxfield, was also married to an expensive clothes-horse, but unlike Harold’s ornament, this one had reproduced. She had two small boys who made a lot of noise and occasionally smelled. My three sisters, all of whom had manufactured quiet, dull, odourless daughters, were united in being very catty about Oliver’s lively sons.
My eldest sister, Henrietta, lived in Wiltshire; she had married a wealthy landowner and life was all tweeds and gun-dogs interspersed with the occasional hunt ball. My second sister, Arabella, had married a wealthy industrialist and now divided her time between London, Rome and her villa at Juan-les-Pins. My third sister, Sylvia, had been unable to marry anyone wealthy, but fortunately her husband was clever at earning a living on the Stock Exchange so they lived in a chic mews house in Chelsea where Sylvia read glossy magazines and tended her plants and told the au pair how to bring up the baby. My mother disapproved of the fact that Sylvia did no charity work. Henrietta toiled ceaselessly for the Red Cross and even Arabella gave charity balls for UNICEF whenever she could remember which country she was living in, but Sylvia, dreaming away among her plants, was too shy to do more than donate clothes to the local church.
I was mildly fond of Sylvia. She was the sister closest to me in age, but since we were so different there had been no jealousy, no fights. Having nothing in common we had inevitably drifted apart after her marriage, but whenever I felt life was intolerable I would head for her mews and sob on her sofa. Sylvia would ply me with instant coffee and chocolate digestive biscuits – an unimaginative response, perhaps, but there are worse ways of showing affection.
All my sisters were good-looking and Arabella was sexy. Henrietta could have been sexy but was too busy falling in love with gun-dogs to bother. Sylvia could have been sexy too but her husband liked her to look demurely chaste so she did. They all spoke in sporano voices with the affected upper-class accent which in those days was beginning to die out. I was a contralto and I had taken care to speak with a standard BBC accent ever since I had been teased by the middle-class fiends at my vile country preparatory school for ‘speaking la-di-da’. My sisters had escaped this experience. They had attended an upper-class establishment in London before being shovelled off to an equally upper-class boarding school, but in 1945 my parents were able to reclaim Flaxton Hall, which had been requisitioned during the war, and they were both anxious to spend time in the country while they reorganised their home. I was then eight, too old for kindergarten, too young to be shovelled off to boarding school. Daily incarceration at the hell-hole at Flaxfield, three miles from our home at Flaxton Pauncefoot, proved inevitable.
Possibly it was this torturous educational experience which set me apart from my sisters, but it seemed to me I had always been the odd one out.
‘That child gets plainer every time I see her,’ said Horrible Henrietta once to Absolutely-the-Bottom Arabella when they rolled home from Benenden for the school holidays. Those broad shoulders are almost a deformity – she’s going to wind up looking exactly like a man.’
‘Maybe she’s changing sex. That would explain the tomboyish behaviour and the gruff voice …’
‘Mama, can’t something be done about Venetia’s eyebrows? She’s beginning to look like an ape …’
‘Mama, have you ever thought of shaving Venetia’s head and giving her a wig? That frightful hair really does call for drastic measures …”
My mother, who was fundamentally a nice-natured woman whenever she wasn’t worshipping her plants, did her best to stamp on this offensive behaviour, but the attacks only surfaced in a more feline form when I reached adolescence.
‘Can’t someone encourage poor darling Venetia to take an interest in clothes? Of course I know we can’t all look like a fashion-plate in Vogue, but …’
‘Venetia, my sweet, you simply can’t wear that shade of lipstick or people will think you’re a transvestite from 1930s’ Berlin …’
Even my brothers lapsed into brutality occasionally.
‘Oliver, you’ve got to help me find a young man for Venetia –’
‘Oh God, Mama, don’t ask me!’
‘Harold, do explain to Venetia how ill-advised it is for a young girl to talk about philosophy at dinner-parties – she simply takes no notice when I tell her it’s so dreadfully showy and peculiar –’
‘Certainly, Mama. Now look here, Venetia old girl – and remember I speak purely out of fraternal affection—your average man doesn’t like clever women unless they’re real sizzlers, and since you’ll never be a real sizzler …’
‘Poor Venetia!’ said Absolutely-the-Bottom Arabella to Horrible Henrietta when she knew quite well I was within earshot. ‘No sex appeal.’
‘Well!’ said my father with a sigh of relief once his third daughter was married. ‘Now I can sit back and relax! I don’t have to worry about Venetia, do I? She’ll never be a femme fatale.’
‘… and I can’t tell you how glad I am,’ I overheard my mother confiding to her best friend, ‘that Venetia will inevitably have a quieter life than the others. When I think of all I went through with Arabella – not to mention Henrietta – and even dearest Sylvia was capable of being a little too fast occasionally …’
I remembered that remark as I dressed for dinner on the night of the Aysgarth-Ashworth reunion, and wished I could be a sizzler so fast that no one would see me for dust. I slid into my best dress, which was an interesting shade of mud, but unfortunately I had put on weight with the result that the material immediately wrinkled over my midriff when I dragged up the zip. I tried my second-best dress. The zip got stuck. My third-best dress, which had a loose-fitting waist, was wearable but hopelessly out of fashion and my fourth-best dress transformed me into a sausage again. In rage I returned to number three in the hope that I could divert attention from its unfashionable lines by swathing myself in jewellery.
‘Darling, you look like a Christmas tree!’ exclaimed my mother aghast as she glanced into the room to inspect my progress. ‘Do take off those frightful bracelets – and what on earth is Aunt Maud’s diamond hatpin doing in your hair?’
I sank down on the bed as the door closed. Then in despair I tore away all the jewellery and began to wallop my impossible hair with a brush. Eventually I heard the guests arriving, and after a long interval Harold was dispatched to drag me into the fray.
‘Come along, old girl – everyone’s thinking you must have got locked in the lavatory!’
Loathing the entire world and wishing myself a thousand miles away I followed him downstairs. The sound of animated conversation drifted towards us from the drawing-room, and as I pictured everyone looking matchlessly elegant I had to fight the urge to run screaming through the streets to Sylvia’s house in Chelsea.
‘Here she is!’ chirped idiotic Harold as I finally made my entrance.
All heads swivelled to gaze at my dead dress and diabolical hair. I had a fleeting impression of an unknown couple regarding me with mild astonishment, but just as I was wondering if it were possible to die of humiliation, my Mr Dean exclaimed warmly: ‘My dear Venetia, how very delightful you look!’ and he held out his hands to me with a smile.
IV
It was Aysgarth’s kindness which first attracted me to Christianity; the contrast between his attitude and the callous remarks of the non-believers in my family was so great that I felt the explanation could only be theological. It was small wonder that I hero-worshipped him from an early age, but I must make it clear that I was never in love with him. Such a possibility was inconceivable, first because he was a married clergyman, a creature permanently unavailable for a grand passion, and second because he was over fifty years old and therefore incapable of being classed by my youthful brain as an object of sexual desire. Moreover Aysgarth had become considerably plainer since I had first met him in 1946. By the time of the Ashworth dinner-party eleven years later his springy brown hair was smoother, straighter and a shop-soiled shade of white, while his deeply-lined face was marred by pouches under the eyes. He was also much heavier, not repulsively fat but markedly four-square. ‘Aysgarth’s built like a peasant,’ my father remarked once, not meaning to be unkind but unable to abstain from that insensitive frankness which can be such an unfortunate trait of the aristocracy.
However after Aysgarth’s heroic kindness to me at the beginning of that dinner-party, I would hardly have cared if he had been built like an elephant, and as soon as Primrose and I had the chance for a quick word I said to her enviously: ‘You’re so damned lucky to have a father like that.’
‘Isn’t he wonderful? All other men seem so dreary in comparison.’
Immediately I felt annoyed with myself for giving her the opportunity to drool; once Primrose started flaunting her Elektra complex she was nauseous. ‘Professor Ashworth doesn’t look too bad,’ I said in the hope of diverting her. ‘In fact I’d say he was rather well preserved for a man of his age.’
After my embarrassing entry into the room my mother had cursorily introduced me to the Ashworths, but afterwards the Professor had been buttonholed by Harold while Mrs Ashworth had been cornered by my fascinated father so I had had no opportunity to converse with them. I now paused to inspect the Professor with care. He was a tall man who had kept his figure; I learned later that he had excelled at games in his youth and still possessed a single-figure handicap as a golfer. Middle age had given him a receding hairline, but his curly dark hair was streaked in just the right places with just the right shade of glamorous silver. He had brown eyes, a straight nose, a firm jaw with a cleft chin, and deep lines about his strong mouth. These lines, which immediately suggested past suffering, reminded me he had once been a prisoner of war.
I opened my mouth to remark to Primrose how rare it was to encounter a handsome cleric, but at that moment we were interrupted by James, Aysgarth’s soldier son, and I was obliged to endure a lot of jolly talk about nothing. Nevertheless I kept an eye on the Professor. He was gliding around, displaying a formidable social technique as he talked to everyone in turn. From various syllables which reached my ears I gathered he was even able to talk to Harold’s clothes-horse about fashion.
Eventually Primrose was unable to resist abandoning me to move to her father’s side, jolly James decided to take a hand in passing around the canapés (our butler Pond was most put out) and I was just pretending to inspect my mother’s somewhat constipated flower arrangement when the future Bishop of Starbridge materialised at my elbow and said with such a polished charm that I even thought for a moment that he was genuinely interested in me: ‘I hear you’ve been visiting Florence. It’s a beautiful city, isn’t it?’
‘Possibly,’ I said, determined not to simper at him merely because he was one of the most distinguished churchmen in England, ‘but I don’t like Abroad.’
‘In that case I assume you’re glad to be home!’
‘Not specially, but don’t let’s waste time talking about me, Professor. I’m not a bit interesting, although it’s very kind of you to pretend that I am. Why don’t you tell me all about you?’
I had pierced the cast-iron professional charm. ‘Ah, so you’re a listener!’ he exclaimed with a seemingly genuine amusement. ‘How delightful!’
Mrs Ashworth, slender and sleek in a black dress, chose that moment to interrupt us. My first impression had been that she was much younger than her husband, but now I saw that she was probably his contemporary; her neck had that crêpe-like look which afflicts women past the menopause, but she was so immaculately made up that one barely noticed the tell-tale signs of age. Her dark hair was swept back from her forehead and drawn into a bun at the nape of her neck. Her rimless spectacles gave her a chaste, schoolmistressy look which was curiously at odds with the wicked little dress which clung to her svelte figure, and at once I decided she was far more interesting than her husband. The Professor seemed a very typical product of the best public schools and universities, but Mrs Ashworth, whom I found impossible to place against any definitive background, didn’t seem typical of anything.
She was saying lightly to her husband: ‘Vamping young girls again, darling?’
‘Indeed I am – I’ve just discovered Miss Flaxton’s a listener.’
‘Ah, a femme fatale!’ said Mrs Ashworth, regarding me with a friendly interest as I mentally reeled at her choice of phrase. ‘How clever of you, Miss Flaxton! Men adore good listeners – they have a great need to pour out their hearts regularly to sympathetic women.’
‘I do it all the time myself,’ said the Professor, effortlessly debonair. ‘Apart from golf it’s my favourite hobby.’
‘How very intriguing that sounds!’ said Aysgarth, sailing into our midst with his champagne glass clasped tightly in his hand. ‘Am I allowed to ask what this hobby is or should I preserve a discreet silence?’
There was a small but awkward pause during which I was the only one who laughed – a fact which startled me because although the remark could have been classed as risqué it could hardly have been described as offensive. Yet both Ashworths were as motionless as if Aysgarth had made some error of taste, and Aysgarth himself immediately began to behave as if he had committed a faux pas. ‘Sorry,’ he mumbled. ‘Bad joke. Silly of me.’
The Professor made a lightning recovery. ‘No, no!’ he said, smooth as glass. ‘I was merely startled because you seemed to materialise out of nowhere!’
‘Just thought I’d seize the chance for a quick word before we all go in to dinner –’
‘Of course – I was thinking only a moment ago that I’d talked to everyone in the room except you –’
‘Seems ages since we last met –’
‘Yes, it’s certainly a long time –’
‘Oxford ‘fifty-two, wasn’t it?’ said Aysgarth, having regained his equilibrium with the aid of a large swig of champagne. ‘That weekend when we were both guests of the Master of Balliol.’
‘No, you’ve seen Charles since then,’ said Mrs Ashworth. ‘We met in London when we all helped the Dean of Westminster recover from the Coronation.’
‘So we did! I’d quite forgotten … I’m sorry, I can’t quite remember – dear me, I’m beginning to sound like an amnesiac – but did I ever call you Lyle?’
‘I really have no idea,’ said Mrs Ashworth, as if such a feat of memory was well beyond her capabilities, ‘but please do in future. Did I ever call you Neville?’
‘Neville!’ I exclaimed. ‘But no one calls him Neville nowadays – he’s always Stephen!’
‘Ah,’ said Mrs Ashworth, ‘but you see, I met him before the war when Bishop Jardine appointed him Archdeacon of Starbridge. I was Mrs Jardine’s companion at the time.’
Much intrigued I said: ‘But how romantic that you should now be returning in such style to the house where you were once a mere companion!’
‘It would indeed be romantic if it were true, but the Jardines lived in the old episcopal palace which is now the Choir School, whereas Charles and I will be living – thank goodness! – in the South Canonry. I wouldn’t have wanted to return to the palace,’ said Mrs Ashworth serenely. Too many –’ She hesitated but for no more than a second ‘– poignant memories.’
Aysgarth said: ‘Do you regret the loss of the palace, Ashworth?’ but the Professor replied promptly: ‘Not in the least – and my dear fellow, if you’re going to call my wife Lyle, I really don’t see why you should now fight shy of calling me Charles! I only hope I have your permission to call you Stephen in the interesting times which I’m sure lie ahead for us all.’
Aysgarth at once became almost inarticulate with a shyness which I suspected was triggered not only by his social inferiority complex, but by his gratitude that Ashworth should be making such a marked effort to be friendly. He could only manage to say: ‘Yes. Stephen. Fine. Please do,’ and toss off the remains of his champagne.
Appearing in contrast wholly relaxed Ashworth observed: ‘It really is most remarkable that our careers should have coincided like this – in fact, if you knew how often Lyle and I have been telling ourselves recently that God moves in mysterious ways –’
‘Darling,’ said Mrs Ashworth, ‘if you quote that ghastly cliché once more I shall be tempted to strangle you with your brand-new pectoral cross.’
‘More champagne anyone?’ enquired jolly James, still playing the butler.
His father at once held out his glass. ‘“Well, I don’t mind if I do, sir!” as Colonel Chinstrap used to say on ITMA –’
‘Oh, how I adored ITMA!’ said my mother, drifting over to us and eyeing her constipated flower arrangement as if she had suddenly realised it needed a laxative. ‘Venetia, can you pass around the cigarettes? Pond seems to have disappeared in a huff for some reason …’
‘That bishop-to-be is going to look simply too heavenly in gaiters,’ Harold’s clothes-horse was drawling as she demolished her third dry martini.
‘Can someone stop young James playing the butler?’ muttered my father. ‘Pond’s taken violent umbrage.’
‘… and what I absolutely can’t understand,’ idiotic Harold was burbling in a corner, ‘is how Pater, who can’t bear going to church and has always said “Boo!” to God, has got himself mixed up with these high-powered clerical wallahs.’
‘He’ll probably wind up taking the sacrament on his deathbed,’ said Primrose, ‘like Lord Marchmain in Brideshead.’
‘Brideshead?’ said Harold. ‘Where’s that?’
‘I’m damned hungry,’ said my father to my mother. ‘Are they all dead drunk in the kitchen?’
‘Dinner is served, my Lord!’ thundered Pond reproachfully from the doorway, and with relief we all descended to the dining-room.
V
The next evening Aysgarth called at six o’clock with a note of thanks and a bunch of carnations for my mother, but found only me at home. My mother had travelled down to Flaxton Pauncefoot that morning and my father was attending a Lords’ debate on education. Harold and the clothes-horse had not yet returned from a day at the races.
When Pond showed Aysgarth into the drawing-room I was reading Professor Ashworth’s latest book, St Augustine and the Pelagian Heresy: the Origins of His Theology Concerning God’s Grace, which I had borrowed from the library. The Professor wrote in a cool, lucid prose which created an impression of scholarly detachment and yet succeeded in being surprisingly readable – but perhaps that was because he was writing of St Augustine’s fight to master his sex drive, a fight which was to have immense repercussions both for Christianity and for the bluff heretic Pelagius who had said (more or less) that man could jolly well pull himself up by his own bootstraps and conquer sin not by God’s grace but by will-power and a stiff upper lip.
Pelagius, it is hardly necessary to add, had been a Briton.
‘Oh, I’ve read that book,’ said Aysgarth as we settled down for a delectable discussion of the dinner-party. ‘I thought it very bad. Like St Augustine Charles’s twin obsessions are heresy and sex. Apparently up at Cambridge all his divinity undergraduates refer to him as Anti-Sex Ashworth.’
‘How extraordinary! He seemed quite normal.’
‘No, no – rabid against fornication and adultery. Such a mistake! In my opinion there are far worse sins than the sexual errors, and – whoops! Here’s Pond with the drinks.’
Pond deposited the sherry and whisky decanters, the soda-siphon and a suitable selection of glasses on the side-table and waited for orders, but I waved him away.
‘Help yourself, Mr Dean.’
‘Well, perhaps a little soupçon of sherry –’
‘Oh, go on – have a whisky! You don’t want to go down in history as Anti-Alcohol Aysgarth!’
‘That possibility,’ said my Mr Dean, helping himself to a modest measure of scotch, ‘is so remote that I don’t think we need consider it seriously. And I must guard my tongue about Charles, who was certainly more than civil to me last night – even though I nearly shocked him to death with my opening remark –’
‘But only a second before you arrived Mrs Ashworth had been teasing him about vamping young girls! I don’t think you shocked him at all – he was just taken aback because you slunk up behind him and –’
‘– hit him over the head with a double entendre! I must have been mad.’
‘I thought you were sensational. And so was Mrs Ashworth, making that little black dress look like a hundred-guinea model from Harrods just by wearing one piece of jewellery – and choosing rimless spectacles instead of glasses with distracting frames – and dyeing her hair so cunningly that no man would ever dream it had been touched up –’
‘Dyeing her hair? But no clergyman’s wife would ever do that!’
‘Yes, I expect that’s what the Professor thinks too whenever he’s not busy conquering everyone in sight by exuding that synthetic charm of his. But tell me: who is Mrs Ashworth? Where did she come from? And how did the two of them meet?’
‘Ah!’ said Aysgarth, settling down cosily for a gossip. ‘Now that’s quite a story …’
VI
Apparently Mrs Ashworth had grown up in a remote Norfolk parish where her great-uncle had been the vicar; her parents had died young. This clerical background had enabled her to obtain the post of companion to Bishop Jardine’s wife when Jardine himself, rocketing racily up the Church’s ladder of preferment, had been appointed Dean of Radbury in the ’twenties. Five years later in 1932 he had become the Bishop of Starbridge. In 1937, the young Charles Ashworth, already a doctor of divinity, had decided to visit Starbridge to do some research in the Cathedral Library, and since he was the protégé of Archbishop Lang he had been invited to stay at the episcopal palace. Crossing the threshold he had fallen instantly and violently in love with Mrs Jardine’s companion.
Since Mrs Jardine had been an ineffectual woman who had relied on her companion to run the palace for her, this coup de foudre had caused chaos, but Ashworth, much to the Bishop’s fury, had refused to be deflected from his romantic charge to the altar.
‘The whole trouble was,’ said Aysgarth, ‘that Lyle’s departure was a bereavement for the Jardines as well as a crippling inconvenience. They were a childless couple who’d come to regard her as a daughter, and they’d reached the stage where they couldn’t imagine life without her.’
‘Presumably they were all reconciled later?’
‘Oh yes, but back in 1937 –’
‘– the Jardine dragon had to be vanquished before St George could carry away the maiden on his shining white horse!’
‘As a matter of fact whether he was a saint and she was a maiden was hotly debated later when the two of them produced a baby only seven months after the wedding, but since the infant was very small and delicate, just as a premature baby should be, everyone eventually agreed that the maiden’s purity had been unsullied prior to her marriage.’
‘Rather tricky to be a clergyman,’ I said, ‘and produce a baby a shade too fast.’
‘Most embarrassing for poor Charles! However I never had any serious doubt that he’d behaved himself – he was always too ambitious to do anything else.’ As an afterthought he added: ‘He was married before – his first wife was killed in a car crash – but although he was a widower for some time before he met Lyle you can be sure he kept himself in order. The first thing a successful young clergyman learns to acquire, if he wants to continue as a success, is an immaculate self-control in dealing with women.’
‘At least nowadays clergymen can get married, which is more than poor St Augustine could – although actually I don’t understand why St Augustine couldn’t marry. Why did he have to be celibate?’
‘Well, in the days of the Early Church …’
We embarked on a fascinating conversation about the origins of clerical celibacy, and Aysgarth promised to lend me his copy of St Augustine’s Confessions.
‘My dear Venetia,’ he sighed at last as he finished his whisky and rose reluctantly to his feet, ‘how very much I enjoy talking to you!’
I smiled radiantly at him and felt like a sizzler.
VII
I should perhaps make it clear that contrary to the impression I may have created while describing the turning point of his career, I did not see Aysgarth often. He led a busy life at Westminster, and I was often away. After leaving boarding school I had been obliged to endure periods of exile in Switzerland and Italy, and even when I returned to England I often sneaked down to Flaxton Pauncefoot in order to escape from the ghastly London social events where I was either ignored or treated as a freak. Life drifted on. I had no idea what I wanted to do. My métier seemed to consist of sipping drinks, smoking cigarettes and reading books. There was no calling, no summons from God written in the sky in letters of fire, and increasingly often it seemed to me that my career as an adult was incapable of beginning so long as I remained condemned to the sidelines of life by my unfortunate looks and my embarrassing intellectual inclinations.
Sometimes I gave way to despair. Supposing I had to suffer the ultimate horror of not marrying? Then I would be ‘poor old Venetia’, that pathetic freak, till my dying day. The prospect was intolerable. My depression deepened. My parents found me increasingly difficult, and soon after the Aysgarth-Ashworth dinner-party they decided that something would have to be done.
It was unusual for my parents to stage a joint attack. My mother preferred to leave the bombastic behaviour to my father and take refuge in the conservatory, but on this occasion she was apparently desperate enough to decide that I was more important than her plants.
‘We just thought we’d have a little word, darling,’ she said soothingly after we had all assembled for battle in the drawing-room of our house in Lord North Street. ‘Your father’s actually quite worried about you.’
‘Worried?’ said my father, bristling with rage. ‘I’m not worried, I’m livid! I shouldn’t have to deal with a recalcitrant daughter at my age – it’s bad for my blood pressure.’
‘You should have thought of that,’ I said tartly, ‘before you frolicked around with Mama in Venice in 1936.’
‘Frolicked? What a damn silly word – makes me sound like a bloody pansy!’
‘Oh, do stop screaming at each other!’ begged my mother, fanning herself lightly with the latest edition of Homes and Gardens. ‘What happened in ‘thirty-six is quite irrelevant – except that here you are, Venetia, and we have to help you make the best of your life – which means we simply must insist that you now stop frivolling and –’
‘Frivolling?’ I mimicked. ‘What a damn silly word! Makes me sound like a bloody butterfly!’
‘Oh my God,’ said my mother, taking refuge in Homes and Gardens.
‘Just because you happen to be reading St Augustine’s Confessions’ said my father, storming into the attack, ‘you needn’t think you’re not frittering away your time – and I must say, I think Aysgarth should have asked my permission before he lent you that book. Parts of it are most unsuitable for an unmarried young woman.’
‘If you mean that incident in the public baths when Augustine was fourteen –’
‘What a lovely picture of a cyclamen!’ murmured my mother, gazing enrapt at a page of her magazine.
‘If you’d gone up to Oxford,’ said my father to me, ‘as I wanted you to, you wouldn’t be lying around sipping gin at odd hours, smoking those disgusting cigarettes and reading about fourteen-year-old boys in public baths!’
‘If I’d gone up to Oxford,’ I said, ‘I’d be studying the work of Greek pederasts, ordering champagne by the case and damn well looking at fourteen-year-old boys in public baths!’
‘Now look here, you two,’ said my mother, reluctantly tossing her magazine aside, ‘this won’t do. Ranulph, you must try not to get so upset. Venetia, you must stop talking like a divorcée in an attempt to shock him – and you must try to remember that since he watched his own father die of drink and his brother die of – well, we won’t mention what he died of – your father has an absolute horror of the havoc wealth can cause among people who lack the self-discipline to lead worthwhile, productive lives. The truth is that people like us, who are privileged, should never forget that privileges are always accompanied by responsibilities. We have a moral duty to devote our wealth and our time to worthy causes and live what the lower orders can see is a decent upright life.’
‘Hear, hear!’ bellowed my father.
‘I’m sure you think that was a dreadfully old-fashioned speech,’ pursued my mother, encouraged by this roar of approval to sound uncharacteristically forceful, ‘but believe me, it’s neither smart nor clever to be an effete member of the aristocracy. You must be occupied in some acceptable manner, and fortunately for you, since you live today and not yesterday, that means you can train for an interesting job. I do understand, I promise you, why you chose not to go up to Oxford; being a blue-stocking isn’t every woman’s dream of happiness. But since you’ve rejected an academic life you must choose some other career to pursue while you fill in your time before getting married. After all, even Arabella had a job arranging flowers in a hotel! I know she wound up in a muddle with that Italian waiter, but –’
‘I don’t want to arrange flowers in a hotel.’
‘Well, perhaps if you were to take a nice cordon bleu cookery course at Winkfield –’
‘I don’t want to take a nice cordon bleu cookery course at Winkfield.’
‘You don’t want to do anything,’ said my father. ‘It’s an absolute waste of a first-class brain. Awful. Tragic. It makes me want to –’
‘Ranulph,’ said my mother, ‘don’t undo all my good work, there’s a pet. Venetia –’
‘I think I’d like to be a clergyman.’
‘Darling, do be serious!’
‘All right, all right, I’ll take a secretarial course! At least that’ll be better than arranging bloody flowers!’
‘I can’t stand it when women swear,’ said my father. ‘Kindly curb your language this instant.’
‘You may have spent a lot of your life declaring in the name of your liberal idealism that men and woman should be treated equally,’ I said, ‘but I’ve never met a man who was so reluctant to practise what he preached! If you really believed in sexual equality you’d sit back and let me say “bloody” just as often as you do!’
‘I give up,’ said my mother. ‘I’m off to the conservatory.’
‘And I’m off to the Athenaeum,’ said my father. ‘I simply daren’t stay here and risk a stroke any longer.’
‘How typical!’ I scoffed. ‘The champion of equality once again takes refuge in an all-male club!’
‘Bloody impertinence!’ roared my father.
‘Bloody hypocrite!’ I shouted back, and stormed out, slamming the door.
VIII
If I had been living in the ’sixties I might then have left home and shared a flat with cronies; I might have taken to drink or drugs (or both) and chased after pop singers, or I might have opened a boutique or become a feminist or floated off to Nepal to find a guru. But I was living in the ’fifties, that last gasp of the era which had begun in those lost years before the war, and in those days nice young girls ‘just didn’t do that kind of thing’, as the characters in Hedda Gabler say. (Hedda Gabler was one of Aysgarth’s favourite plays; he adored that clever doomed sizzler of a heroine.)
It was also a fact that in between the acrimonious rows my life at home was much too comfortable to abandon in a fit of pique. My parents, exercising a policy of benign neglect, were usually at pains to avoid breathing down my neck, ordering me about and preaching nauseous sermons about setting an example to the lower orders. I was waited on hand and foot, well fed and well housed. In short, I had sufficient incentives to postpone a great rebellion, and besides, like Hedda Gabler, I shied away from any idea of not conforming to convention. If I flounced around being a rebel I knew I would only earn the comment: ‘Poor old Venetia – pathetic as ever!’ and wind up even worse off than I already was.
So after that row with my parents in 1957 I did not rush immediately upstairs to pack my bags. I gritted my teeth and faced what I saw as the cold hard facts of life: no longer could I sit around sipping gin, smoking cigarettes and soaking up the sexy reminiscences of St Augustine. The day of reckoning for my refusal to go up to Oxford was at hand, and just like any other (usually middle-class) girl who considered that the hobbies of flower-arranging and playing with food were far beneath her, I had to embark on a secretarial training.
However as I reflected that night on my capitulation to parental bullying, I thought I could face my reorganised future without too much grief; a secretarial course could well be my passport to what I thought of as Real Life, the world beyond my mother’s gardens and my father’s clubs, a world in which people actually lived – swilling and swearing, fighting and fornicating – instead of merely existing bloodlessly in charity committee meetings or in cloud-cuckoo-lands such as the Athenaeum and the House of Lords.
I decided to go to Mrs Hester’s Secretarial College because Primrose had attended a course there while I had been fighting off death by boredom in Switzerland and Italy. Like me, Primrose had been encouraged by her school to try for a place at Oxford, but she had convinced me that an Oxford education was the one thing we both had to avoid if we were to have any hope of experiencing Real Life in the future.
‘Christian told me frankly it would reduce my chance of marrying to nil,’ she had confided, ‘and there’s no doubt spinsters are always regarded with contempt. Besides, how on earth could I go up to Oxford and leave poor Father all alone with Dido? He’d go mad if he didn’t have me to talk to whenever she was driving him round the bend.’ Primrose had never been away from home. She had attended St Paul’s Girls School in London while I had been incarcerated at Cheltenham Ladies’ College, and I had always secretly resented the fact that her father had considered her indispensable while mine had been willing to consign me to an institution.
Although Primrose was anxious to marry eventually, just as a successful woman should, she never seemed to mind having no boyfriends. Instead she channelled her gregarious inclinations towards forming a circle of female friends whom her brothers condescendingly referred to as ‘the Gang’. Some of the Gang had been at school with her, some had been débutantes with us in 1955 and some had been her classmates at Mrs Hoster’s. Aysgarth adored us all. Dido used to refer to us as ‘Stephen’s Little Harem’ and look indulgent. ‘Name your favourite of the day!’ we would tease him as he sat beaming on the sofa and we lounged on the carpet at his feet, but he would sigh: ‘I can’t decide! It’s as if you were asking a chocolate addict to select from a row of equally luscious peppermint creams!’
When the Aysgarths moved to Starbridge in 1957, it was thought the Gang might drift apart, but Starbridge was an easy journey by train from London and the core of the Gang kept in touch. Abandoning all thought of a secretarial career in London, Primrose landed a job at the diocesan office on Eternity Street, and in order to avoid constant clashes with Dido she had her own flatlet in the Deanery’s former stables. Time ticked on. I completed my secretarial training and drifted through a series of jobs in art galleries and antique shops and publishing houses. Then with the dawn of the new decade the Gang at last began to disintegrate. Penny and Sally got married, Belinda joined the Wrens, Tootsie became an actress and was expelled from the Gang for Conduct Unbecoming, Midge dropped out to grow daffodils in the Scilly Isles, and by 1963 only I was left in ‘Stephen’s Little Harem’ – ‘The last peppermint cream left in the box!’ as my chocolate-loving Mr Dean put it so saucily, much to his wife’s annoyance.
‘You really should make more effort to get married, Venetia,’ she said soon afterwards. ‘In the game of life women who don’t marry are inevitably regarded as such amateurs, and you wouldn’t want people to look down on you pityingly, would you, my dear? That’s one thing a clever girl can never endure.’
I could have withstood that woman better if she had been merely mad and bad. But it was her talent for disembowelling her victims with the knife of truth which made her so thoroughly dangerous to know.
It was 1963. The innocent days were almost over, and in the early spring, just after John Robinson, the suffragan bishop of Woolwich, published the book which was to shake the Church of England to its foundations, the foundations of my own world were at last rocked by the earthquake of change. Exasperated by my failure to stay in any job longer than a year, my father went to great trouble to obtain a post for me at the Liberal Party’s headquarters. I handed in my notice a week later.
‘How dare you do this to me!’ shouted my father, who was now seventy-two and even less capable of managing a recalcitrant daughter.
‘My dear Papa, I’m the victim, not you! I was the one who actually had to work at that ghastly place!’
‘Well, if you think you can loaf around under my roof doing nothing for the next six months –’
‘Nothing would induce me to loaf around under your roof a day longer!’ I said, almost twenty-six years old and finally summoning the strength to burst out of my luxurious prison. ‘I’m off to Starbridge to meditate on God and contemplate Eternity – which is exactly what you ought to be doing at your age!’
And having delivered myself of this speech, which could be guaranteed to infuriate any humanist past endurance, I embarked on my journey into adventure.
THREE (#u1a2015f4-5a4f-576d-b3e6-9f4b56d41963)
‘But now “God” is news!’
JOHN A. T. ROBINSON
Suffragan Bishop of Woolwich 1959–1969
Writing about Honest to God in the Sunday Mirror, 7th April 1963
I
At Waterloo Station I encountered Charley Ashworth, the Bishop’s elder son, whom I had occasionally met in Starbridge during my visits to the Aysgarths. He was a year my junior, small, chatty and bumptious. It was generally agreed that the bumptiousness masked an inferiority complex which had arisen because he was plain while his brother Michael was handsome. After completing his National Service Charley had gone up to Cambridge, where he had taken a first in divinity, and in 1961 he had entered a theological college, also in Cambridge, to learn how to be a clergyman. This exercise, which hardly seemed compatible with his pugnacious personality, was still going on.
‘Good heavens – Venetia!’ he exclaimed, speeding towards me with a suitcase in one hand and a copy of Bishop Robinson’s Honest to God in the other. ‘What are you doing here?’ He made it sound as if I were trespassing.
‘Just admiring the view from platform twelve.’ I had set down my bags in order to rest my wrists; I never managed to travel light. Around us throbbed the echoing noise and mouldy smell of a mighty station. I had been gazing at the inert train nearby and trying to decide which end would have the best chance of offering me a solitary journey.
‘But I’d heard you were running the Liberal Party!’ Charley was protesting as I realised my hopes of solitude had been dashed.
‘I decided I wasn’t political.’
‘Good for you! Personally I think women should keep out of politics.’
‘And what do you think they should keep in?’
‘The home, of course.’ He heaved open the door of the nearest carriage and flung out his hand generously towards the interior as if he were offering a child a treat. ‘In you go!’
‘Could you deal with my bags?’ I said. ‘We girls are such delicate little flowers that we have to rely on strong brave boys like you to help us whenever we’re not sitting at home being plastic dolls.’
‘Very funny!’ said Charley good-humouredly, my sarcasm quite lost on him, and without complaint turned his attention to my bulging suitcases.
‘How are you getting on with Honest to God?’ I enquired as he tossed his book on to the seat.
‘Oh, have you heard of it?’
‘I can read, you know. OUR IMAGE OF GOD MUST GO, SAYS BISHOP –’
‘That article in the Observer was a disgrace!’
‘Did you think so? I adored it – such fun when a Church of England bishop declares to all and sundry that he doesn’t believe in God!’
‘But that’s not what Robinson’s saying at all –’
‘That’s what laymen think he’s saying.’
‘And that’s exactly why the book’s a disgrace! It’s so bad for laymen. My father says that Robinson’s being thoroughly irresponsible as well as intellectually slipshod, and I agree with him,’ said Charley, exuding outraged virtue as he heaved my bags up on to the rack. ‘My father and I always agree on everything.’ Closing the carriage door he pulled down the window and began to scan the platform.
‘Tedious for you,’ I said. ‘My father and I are in perpetual disagreement. Life’s just one long glorious row.’ But Charley, leaning out of the window, was too absorbed in some private anxiety to reply.
‘Bother the infant,’ he said at last, glancing at his watch. ‘He’s cutting it very fine.’
‘What infant’s this?’
‘I doubt if you’d know him – he’s only twenty. He’s supposed to be staying tonight with us at the South Canonry.’ Again he hung out of the window in an agony of suspense but a moment later he was bawling ‘Hey!’ in relief and wildly waving his arm.
A tall, pale youth, earnest and bespectacled, appeared at the door and was hustled into the carriage. He wore very clean jeans and a spotless blue shirt with a black leather jacket. All he was carrying was a duffle-bag. ‘Sorry I’m late,’ he said. ‘I got lost on the underground.’ Unaware that Charley and I knew each other he wasted no time looking at me but removed his glasses and began to polish them with an exquisitely ironed white handkerchief. In the distance the guard’s whistle blew and after a preliminary jerk the train began to glide out of the station.
‘Venetia,’ Charley said, remembering his manners, ‘this is Nicholas Darrow. Nick, this is the Honourable Venetia Flaxton.’
‘I find it more comfortable these days to drop the Honourable,’ I said. ‘Hullo, Nick.’
Replacing his spectacles he looked me straight in the eyes and at once I felt as if I stood in a plunging lift. ‘Hi,’ he said politely without smiling. His eyes were an unnaturally clear shade of grey.
‘Have we met before?’ said my voice. I sounded as unnerved as I felt, but I knew that the obvious explanation for my loss of poise – sexual bewitchment – was quite wrong. He was a plain young man. Yet somehow he contrived to be compulsively watchable.
‘No, we haven’t met,’ he was answering tranquilly, opening his duffle-bag and pulling out a book. It was Honest to God.
‘Nick’s father was principal of the Starbridge Theological College back in the ’forties,’ Charley said. ‘Maybe Nick’s jogging your memory of him.’
‘No, that’s impossible. I wasn’t involved in Starbridge ecclesiastical circles until the Aysgarths moved to the Deanery in ’fifty-seven.’
Charley obviously decided to dismiss my confusion as a mere feminine vagary. ‘Nick’s reading divinity up at Cambridge just as I did,’ he said, ‘and – good heavens, Nick, so you’ve bought Honest to God! What’s your verdict so far?’
‘Peculiar. Can it really be possible to reach the rank of bishop and know nothing about the English mystics?’
‘Maybe he can’t connect with them,’ I said. ‘I certainly can’t. I think Julian of Norwich’s description of Christ’s blood is absolutely revolting and borders on the pathological.’
The grave grey eyes were again turned in my direction and again I wondered why his mysterious magnetism should seem familiar.
‘Well, of course it’s very hard for a layman to approach these apparently morbid touches from the right angle,’ Charley was saying with such condescension that I wanted to slap him, ‘but if one takes the time to study the mystics with the necessary spiritual seriousness—’
‘You’re a church-goer,’ said Nick suddenly to me.
‘Now and then, yes.’
‘But you’re not a communicant.’
‘I watch occasionally.’ I was still trying to work out how he had made these deductions when Charley exclaimed in delight: ‘In college we debate about people like you! You’re from the fringes – the shadowy penumbra surrounding the hard core of church membership!’
‘I most certainly am not!’ I said, concealing my fury behind a voice of ice. ‘I’ve been christened and confirmed – I’m just as much a member of the Church of England as you are!’
‘But if you’re not a regular communicant –’
‘I’ve never been able to understand why chewing a bit of artificial bread and sipping some perfectly ghastly wine should confer the right to adopt a holier-than-thou attitude to one’s fellow-Christians.’
‘Shall I give you my best lecture on the sacraments?’ said Charley, allowing a sarcastic tone of voice to enhance his nauseous air of condescension.
‘No, read Honest to God and shut up. It’s narrow-minded, arrogant believers like you who give the Church a bad name.’
Charley flushed. His pale brown eyes seemed to blaze with golden sparks. His wide mouth hardened into a furious line. ‘If all so-called believers were a little more devout, we might have more chance of beating back sin!’
‘Who wants to beat back sin?’ I said. ‘I’m mad about it myself.’ And opening my bag I casually pulled out the famous unexpurgated Penguin edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
That closed the conversation.
The train thundered on towards Starbridge.
II
‘Sorry,’ said Charley to me an hour later. ‘I didn’t mean to offend you. Since you don’t come from a religious family, it’s very praiseworthy that you go to church at all.’
‘Oh, my father’s devoted to religion,’ I said. ‘He just has trouble believing in God.’
‘So he didn’t mind you being baptised and confirmed?’
‘Mind! He insisted on it! In his opinion all loyal English people ought to go through the initiation rites of the Church of England – it’s part of our tribal heritage, like learning about King Alfred burning the cakes and memorising the patriotic speeches from Henry V and singing “Land of Hope and Glory” at the last night of The Proms.’
‘This is most interesting, isn’t it, Nick?’ said Charley. ‘When one comes from a religious home one doesn’t realise what extraordinary attitudes flourish elsewhere.’
‘What’s so extraordinary about them?’ I said. ‘Isn’t the main purpose of our glorious Church to reassure us all that God is without doubt an Englishman?’
‘You’re teasing me!’ said Charley. But he sounded uncertain.
I suddenly became aware that Nick was gazing at me. I had intercepted his gaze more than once during our hour of silence, and as I caught him in the act yet again I demanded: ‘Why do you keep staring at me as if I’m an animal at the zoo?’
He lowered his gaze and shifted uncomfortably in his seat. ‘Sorry.’ His voice was almost inaudible. ‘It’s the aura.’
‘Nick’s a psychic,’ said Charley serenely as my jaw sagged. ‘That’s how he knew you were a church-goer but not a communicant.’
‘No, it wasn’t!’ said Nick angrily. ‘Her knowledge of Dame Julian suggested she was interested enough in Christianity to be a church-goer, and her repulsion towards the description of Christ’s blood suggested she was unlikely to take part in any symbolic ritual involving it. The deduction I made was completely rational and involved no psychic powers whatsoever!’
‘Okay, but you can’t deny you’re a psychic – think what a whizz you were at Pelmanism!’
‘Shut up, I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘I always thought it was such a shame when your father stopped you telling fortunes –’
‘Shut up, Charley!’ Jumping to his feet the youth heaved open the door into the corridor and stalked out in a rage.
‘It’s not my day, is it? said Charley with a sigh. ‘Why do I always put people’s backs up? I can’t understand it. I only want to be sociable and friendly.’
Leaving him brooding with touching innocence on his abrasive personality I prowled down the corridor to the buffet where I found Nick slumped at a table and sipping Coca-Cola. After buying some liquid which British Rail had the nerve to market as coffee I sat down opposite him.
‘Now look here,’ I said sternly, trying to take advantage of my years of seniority. ‘You’ve made a disturbing statement and I want an explanation. What’s the matter with my aura? Is it exuding gloom and doom?’
He failed to smile. He was a very serious young man. ‘No, turbulence,’ he said. ‘You must be very unhappy. You look so self-assured in your expensive clothes, and you talk so carelessly as if you hadn’t a worry in the world, but underneath you’re throbbing with pain.’
‘Supposing I were to tell you that you’re dead wrong?’
‘I don’t see how I can be. As soon as you mentioned your revulsion towards Dame Julian’s description of Christ’s blood I sensed your blood, spattered all over your psyche, and I knew you were in pain.’
I boggled but recovered. ‘Here,’ I said, shoving my hand palm upwards across the table. ‘Read that and tell me more.’
‘I don’t do that sort of thing nowadays.’ But he glanced at my palm as if he found the temptation hard to resist. ‘Anyway I’m not trained in palmistry. I just hold the hand and wait for the knowledge.’
I grabbed his fingers and intertwined them with mine. ‘Okay, talk. You owe it to me,’ I added fiercely as he still hesitated. ‘You can’t just make gruesome statements and go no further! It’s unfair and irresponsible.’
Sullenly he untwined our fingers, set my hand back on the table and placed his palm over mine. There followed a long silence during which he remained expressionless.
‘My God!’ I said, suddenly overwhelmed by fright. ‘Am I going to die?’
‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘You’re going to live.’ And for one long moment he stared at me appalled before blundering out of the buffet in confusion.
III
I caught up with him just before he reached the carriage. ‘What the hell did you see?’
‘Nothing. I just don’t like meddling with psychic emanations, that’s all, and I promised my father I wouldn’t do it. If I seem upset it’s because I’m angry that I’ve broken my word to him.’ Diving into the carriage he collapsed in a heap on the seat.
Charley, who had been dipping into my copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, hastily shoved it aside but I paid him no attention. I remained in the corridor and stared out of the window at the smooth hills of the Starbridge diocese. The train was now hurtling towards our journey’s end.
‘Nick and I are down here for Easter, of course,’ said Charley, appearing beside me as the train slowed to a crawl on the outskirts of the city. ‘Nick stayed on after the end of term to begin the swot for his exams, and I delayed my return to Starbridge in order to make a retreat with the Fordite monks in London … Are you staying with the Aysgarths or are you heading for home?’
‘The former.’ As the train lurched over a set of points on its approach to the station I stepped back into the carriage and said abruptly to Nick: ‘Are we going to meet again?’
‘Oh yes. And again. And again. And again.’
‘What a terrifying prospect!’
‘No, it’s okay, you don’t have to worry. I’m benign.’
‘I see,’ I said. ‘A recurring phenomenon which ought to be entirely harmless. Like Halley’s Comet.’
Finally I saw him smile. I noticed that he had good teeth, very even, and that when his mouth was relaxed he lost the air of solemnity conjured up by his spectacles. Again my memory was jogged, and as it occurred to me that he was as watchable as a gifted actor I at last solved the riddle of his familiarity. ‘Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘Are you any relation of Martin Darrow, the actor?’
‘He’s my half-brother.’
I relaxed. Although I’m not averse to paranormal puzzles I much prefer mysteries that are capable of a rational explanation. ‘My mother’s mad on him,’ I said agreeably, ‘never misses an episode of his comedy series, stays glued to the TV. But surely he must be at least thirty years older than you are?’
‘My father had a rather peculiar private life.’
‘Come on, chaps!’ exclaimed Charley, plunging bossily back into the carriage as the train finally halted at the platform. ‘Get a move on! Nick, as you’ve only got a duffle-bag, could you give Venetia a hand with her suitcases?’
I stepped down on to the platform accompanied by my psychic porter. The sun was shining and far away in the distance beyond the train, beyond the railway yard, beyond the roofs of the mean little villas which flanked the tracks, I saw the slim straight spire of the Cathedral.
Blazing with energy Charley bounded ahead and by the time Nick and I emerged from the station he was bouncing towards the episcopal car, a black Rover, as Mrs Ashworth emerged from the driver’s seat. I knew now, six years after our first meeting, that she was the same age as Aysgarth, but on that day she looked more like forty-five than sixty-one. It was not only her slender figure which made her seem youthful but the smooth straight hair coiled simply in a bun; an elderly woman who has the guts to flout fashion by refusing a permanent wave really does deserve to look a long way from the geriatric ward.
Ever since our first meeting when she had boldly identified me as a femme fatale despite the massive evidence to the contrary, I had secretly labelled her my heroine and now, once again, my admiration for her was renewed. She was wearing a pale lilac-coloured raincoat, unbuttoned to reveal a straight grey skirt and a sky-blue blouse – unremarkable clothes, but on her they looked as if they had arrived by special messenger that morning from Paris. Her navy shoes, so different from the old ladies’ ‘support’ footwear which my mother favoured, were notable for the elegance of their stiletto heels. Mrs Ashworth might have turned sixty, but this boring fact had evidently long since been dismissed by her as trivial. Her triumph over the ravages of time was superb.
‘Hullo, Nicholas!’ she exclaimed warmly after she had given Charley a peck on the cheek, but I knew she was much more interested in me. ‘Venetia – what a surprise! I saw Dido Aysgarth earlier today but she didn’t mention they were expecting you at the Deanery.’
‘They’re not expecting me. To be quite honest, Mrs Ashworth, I’m not exactly sure why I’m here. I’m a bit bouleversée at the moment.’
‘How exciting! Come and have tea. I’ve got a prayer-group turning up later and there’s a visiting American bishop who comes and goes like the Cheshire cat’s smile, but at the moment I’m absolutely free.’
My spirits rose, and accepting her invitation with gratitude I slid into the back seat of the Bishop’s Rover.
IV
The South Canonry, where the Ashworths lived, was an early Georgian house far smaller than the old episcopal palace but still too large for a modestly-paid executive with a wife and two adult sons. The garden consisted almost entirely of labour-saving lawns; full-time gardeners were no longer an episcopal perk, and the Ashworths were aided only by a man who came once a week to civilise the lawns with a motor-mower. Mrs Ashworth hated gardening and kept no plants in the house. I always found the bare, uncluttered look in her home immensely appealing.
As I was almost the same age as Charley I had been invited to the house occasionally in the past along with various Aysgarths and other young people in the diocese, but the visits had been infrequent and I had never come to know the Ashworths well. Neither had my parents. My father respected the Bishop’s intellect but found Ashworth was fundamentally unsympathetic to his sentimental, old-fashioned brand of humanism. Whereas Aysgarth was tolerant of agnostics Ashworth seemed hard put to conceal his opinion that agnosticism was an intellectual defect – and there were other differences too, as we all discovered over the years, between the Bishop and the Dean. Aysgarth was gregarious with an apparently inexhaustible supply of good humour, whereas Ashworth, behind his cast-iron charm, was a very private, very serious man. Laymen like my father dubbed Ashworth ‘churchy’ – that sinister pejorative adjective so dreaded by clerics – but Aysgarth was unhesitatingly labelled ‘one of us’. Ashworth, isolated to some degree by the eminence of his office, was held to resemble Kipling’s cat who walked by himself; his close friends had been left behind in Cambridge in 1957, and perhaps this was one of the reasons why he was so close to his wife. It was widely observed how well attuned they were to each other. They seemed to generate that special harmony which one finds more often among childless couples, the harmony of two people who find each other entirely sufficient for their emotional needs.
Considering that the marriage was successful, people found it immensely interesting that the two sons should have undergone such obvious problems: Charley had run away from home when he was eighteen while later Michael had been thrown out of medical school. However, these embarrassing episodes now belonged to the past. Charley had been rescued, sorted out and replaced on the rails of conformity, while Michael had been steered into the employment of the BBC with happy results. Why Charley should have run away from home no one had any idea, but Michael’s hedonistic behaviour was universally attributed to a desire to rebel against his father’s puritanical views on sin.
‘There’s a screw loose in that family somewhere,’ Dido would say darkly, ‘you mark my words.’
The irony of this statement was that Aysgarth had the biggest possible screw loose in his family – Dido herself – yet all his children were turning out wonderfully well. This fact must have been very galling to the Ashworths as they struggled to surmount their problems at the South Canonry.
When I arrived at the house that afternoon I was immediately soothed by its well-oiled serenity. The drawing-room was notably dust-free and arranged with a tidiness which was meticulous but not oppressive. A superb tea was waiting to be served. The telephone rang regularly but was silenced almost at once by the Bishop’s secretary in her lair by the front door. Dr Ashworth himself was out, fulfilling an official engagement, but if he had been present he too would have been running smoothly, just like the house. I could remember him appearing during my past visits and saying to his wife: ‘What did I do with that memo on the World Council of Churches?’ or: ‘Whatever happened to that letter from the Archbishop?’ or: ‘What on earth’s the name of that clergyman at Butterwood All Saints?’ and Mrs Ashworth, indestructibly composed, would always know all the answers.
After tea Charley went upstairs to unpack, Nick wandered outside to tune into the right nature-vibes – or whatever psychics do in gardens – and Mrs Ashworth took me upstairs to her private sitting-room. Unlike my mother’s boudoir at Flaxton Hall there were no dreary antiques, no ghastly oil-paintings of long-dead ancestors, no boring photographs of babies and no vegetation in sight. The air smelt celestially pure. On the walls hung some black-and-white prints of Cambridge and a water-colour of the Norfolk Broads. The only framed photograph on the chimney-piece showed her husband as an army chaplain during the war.
‘Sit down,’ said Mrs Ashworth, closing the door. ‘Now that we’ve got rid of the men we can relax. Cigarette?’
‘I do like this room,’ I said, accepting the cigarette and sinking into a comfortable armchair. ‘It’s all you, isn’t it? Everything’s your choice. All my life I’ve had to put up with revolting inherited furniture and now I’ve finally reached the point where I’m determined to have a place of my own.’
‘Splendid! All young people need to express themselves through their surroundings. You should have seen Michael’s room when he went through his Brigitte Bardot phase!’
‘I bet Charley puts up all the right pictures,’ I said, not daring to ask what the Bishop had thought of the Bardot pin-ups.
‘Fortunately Charley only has space on his walls for books. My former employer Bishop Jardine left Charley his entire theological library – no doubt because Charley always said he wanted to be a clergyman when he grew up … But let’s get back to you. So you’re seeking a room of your own! But why seek it in Starbridge?’
‘I’m not sure that I will – I’ve only drifted down here because I’ve got a standing invitation to use the Put-U-Up sofa in Primrose’s flat. I’m such a drifter, Mrs Ashworth! I despise myself for drifting but I don’t seem able to stop. It’s as if I’m marking time, waiting for my life to begin, but nothing ever happens.’
‘When will you consider that your life’s begun? At the altar?’
I was grateful for her swift grasp of my dilemma. Well, I know marriage shouldn’t be the be-all and end-all of a woman’s life, but –’
‘It certainly was before the war. Perhaps this is a case where “the more things change the more they remain the same”.’
‘I think it must be. As I see it, I really do have to get married in order to live the kind of life I’d enjoy, but here I am, almost twenty-six, and I’m beginning to think: supposing I never marry, never win respect and status, never stop drifting – I could wind up wasting my entire life.’
‘A nightmarish prospect.’
Terrifying. And then I start to feel desperate – desperate, Mrs Ashworth, I can’t tell you how desperate I feel sometimes – and now I’m convinced I’ve got to act, got to get out of this rut –’
‘Well, it sounds to me as if you’re making progress at last! You’re looking for a place where you can express your real self; you’ve embarked on an odyssey of self-discovery … Do you have to worry about money?’
‘No, I’ve got a hefty income because I came into money from both my godmothers when I was twenty-one. Maybe that’s part of the problem? If I were penniless –’
‘– you’d hate it. I did. Now let’s consider your situation carefully –’
‘I don’t have a situation, Mrs Ashworth, I just have a non-event.’ The words suddenly began to stream out of my mouth. ‘I want to live – I mean live – I want to swill gin and chat about philosophy with a gang of brilliant people and smooch with handsome men and dance till dawn and burn the candle at both ends, but all I get are boring nine-to-five jobs, social events where I’m an embarrassing failure, no love-life and evenings spent swilling gin on my own while listening to Radio Luxemburg. I’ve never had a boyfriend. I did belong to a gang of clever people but they were all girls. Here I am, bursting to join in the Great Party of Life yet confined to the margins by my utter lack of sex appeal, and it’s awful, Mrs Ashworth, absolutely awful, so utterly vile and unfair –’
‘But anyone,’ said Mrs Ashworth, ‘can have sex appeal. It’s simply an attitude of mind.’
I stared at her. She gave me a sphinx-like smile. Enrapt I tried to speak but failed.
‘It’s all a question of confidence,’ said my heroine, flicking ash from her cigarette casually into the nearby tray, ‘and in your case it would be confidence in your appearance. You want to be able to walk into a room and think: I’m glamour personified – how lucky all those men are to see me!’
‘But I’m not beautiful!’
‘Neither was Cleopatra.’
‘Yes, but she was Queen of Egypt –’
‘– and she made the most of it. That’s what you have to do too – make the most of your assets. Stand up for a moment.’
I stood up.
‘Revolve.’
I revolved.
‘Yes,’ said Mrs Ashworth tranquilly, waving her cigarette to indicate I could sit down again, ‘it’s all very simple. Wear plain, tailored clothes which emphasise your waist and hips. Never wear flat shoes even though you happen to be tallish. Favour V-necks to distract the masculine eye from your shoulders and take care not to stoop – that only makes the shoulders more noticeable. And grow your hair.’
‘Grow it? But Mrs Ashworth, I’ll turn into a sort of yak!’
‘Nonsense, men adore the Pre-Raphaelite look. Oh, and go to a beauty salon and get advice on make-up. You have the most beautiful eyes. Make them a focal point.’
‘But do you really think that if I do all this –’
‘That’s just the beginning. Then you must plot how to get in with a crowd of clever, interesting people by exploiting a clever, interesting person who’s already known to you. How about Christian Aysgarth? You can’t be much younger than his wife.’
‘Well, yes, I do know Christian and Katie, but –’
‘Splendid! They’re your passport to your new life. Don’t linger in dull old Starbridge. Seek that room you want in Oxford and wangle your way into Christian’s set.’
‘But Christian just sees me as one of Primrose’s gang of virgin spinsters!’
‘He won’t when you arrive in Oxford flaunting glamorous eye make-up and Pre-Raphaelite hair. I think that you and Primrose,’ said Mrs Ashworth, careful in her choice of words, ‘may have reached the parting of the ways.’ Before I could comment she was adding with regret: ‘I wish I could invite you to stay tonight, but thanks to Nicholas and our visiting American bishop, we’ve got a full house.’
I said with curiosity: ‘What’s Nick’s connection with your family?’
‘His father and Charles have known each other for many years, and since Jon Darrow’s now very old Charles likes to keep a paternal eye on Nicholas to make sure he’s all right.’
‘Isn’t there a mother?’
‘She died. There’s a half-brother in London –’
‘The actor.’
‘That’s right – and there was a half-sister, but she’s dead now too and Nicholas never had much in common with her children.’
‘He’s very …’ I tried to find the right word but could only produce a banality ‘… unusual.’
‘Yes, isn’t he? Sometimes I think he needs a substitute mother, but I never feel my maternal instinct can stretch far enough to take him on – although I must say, my maternal instinct seems to have stretched out of sight during this conversation! I seem to have forgotten I’m a bishop’s wife. Instead of advising you to vamp the intellectuals of Oxford I should be telling you to get a job at the diocesan office and help me with my charity work in your spare time!’
I laughed but before I could reply the front door banged far away in the hall. ‘That’ll be either Charles or our American bishop,’ said Mrs Ashworth, rising to her feet, ‘and let’s hope it’s Charles. I do like Americans, but all that sunny-natured purring’s so exhausting.’
‘Darling!’ shouted the Bishop downstairs.
‘Coo-ee!’ called Mrs Ashworth with relief, and added indulgently to me: ‘Isn’t he funny? He so often arrives home and shouts: “Darling!” like that. It’s as if he has no idea what to do next and is waiting for instructions.’
In walked the Bishop, looking like a film star in a costume melodrama. The old episcopal uniform of apron, gaiters and frock-coat, so suitable for the eighteenth-century bishops who had had to ride around their dioceses on horseback, was finally giving way to more modern attire, but for his official engagement that afternoon Dr Ashworth had decided to be conservative, and he looked well in his swashbuckling uniform. He was two years older than Aysgarth, but like his wife he appeared younger – not much younger, perhaps, but he could still have passed for a man on the right side of sixty.
‘How are your parents?’ he said to me agreeably after the greetings had been exchanged.
‘Seething. I’ve just left home and embarked on a new life.’
He gave me his charming smile but it failed to reach the corners of his eyes. Perhaps he was trying to decide whether I could be classified as ‘wayward’ or ‘lost’ or even ‘fallen’. Smoothly he fell back on his erudition. ‘This sounds like a case of metanoia!’ he remarked. ‘By which I mean –’
‘I know what it means. The Dean told me. It’s a turning away from one’s old life and the beginning of a new one.’
‘In Christ,’ said the Bishop casually, as if correcting an undergraduate who had made an error in a tutorial. ‘I hope the Dean didn’t forget to mention Christ, but these liberal-radicals nowadays seem to be capable of anything.’ He turned to his wife and added: ‘I lost count of the times I was asked about Honest to God this afternoon. People were deeply upset. It’s a pity Robinson wasn’t there to see the results of his ill-informed, half-baked radicalism.’
‘I thought Robinson was supposed to be a conservative,’ I said. ‘After all, he wasn’t invited to contribute to Soundings, was he?’
The Bishop looked startled. ‘Who’s been talking to you of Soundings?’
‘The Dean was very enthusiastic when the book was published.’
‘I’d have more confidence in Stephen’s bold espousal of the views contained in these controversial books if I knew he was a trained theologian,’ said Dr Ashworth. ‘However, as we all know, he read Greats, not Theology, when he was up at Oxford.’
‘But since he’s been a clergyman for almost forty years,’ I said, ‘don’t you think he might have picked up a little theology somewhere along the way?’
The Bishop was clearly not accustomed to being answered back by a young female who had never even been to a university. Possibly he was unaccustomed to being answered back by anyone. He took a moment to recover from the shock but then said suavely enough: ‘Good point! But perhaps I might draw a parallel here with the legal profession. Barristers and solicitors are all qualified lawyers, but when a knotty legal problem arises the solicitors refer the matter to the barristers, the experts, in order to obtain the best advice.’
‘Well, I’m afraid I must now leave you to your expertise,’ I said politely, rising to my feet, ‘and descend from the mountain top of the South Canonry to the valley of the Deanery.’ I turned to my hostess. Thanks so much for the tea and sympathy, Mrs Ashworth.’
‘Drop in again soon,’ said my heroine with a smile, ‘and if there’s anything I can do, just let me know.’
‘Yes indeed,’ said the Bishop, suddenly becoming pastoral. ‘If there’s anything we can do –’
‘I’ll see you out, Venetia,’ said his wife, and led the way downstairs to the hall. As she opened the front door she added: ‘You won’t want to lug your suitcases to the Deanery – I’ll ask Charley to bring them over later in the car.’
I thanked her before saying anxiously: ‘I do hope I didn’t upset the Bishop when I answered back.’
‘My dear, he was enthralled! Such a delightful change for him to meet someone who doesn’t treat him as a sacred object on a pedestal.’ She looked at me thoughtfully with her cool dark eyes before musing: ‘Maybe you’ve been concentrating on the wrong age-group; very few young men have the self-assurance or the savoir-faire to cope with clever women. Try looking for something intelligent, well-educated and pushing forty.’
‘It’ll be either married or peculiar.’
‘Not necessarily … Didn’t I hear a rumour once that Eddie Hoffenberg was rather smitten with you?’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Mrs Ashworth – I’d rather die a virgin spinster!’
Mrs Ashworth merely smiled her enigmatic smile and said: ‘Do keep in touch.’
I drifted away down the drive towards the Deanery.
V
Eddie Hoffenberg emerged from the Deanery just as I approached the front door, so there was no possibility of avoiding him. My father had once referred to him as ‘Aysgarth’s poodle – that bloody Hun,’ but my father, who had lost his best friends in the First War, was notorious for his anti-German sentiment. Other people, less outspoken than my father, were content to regard Eddie with a polite antipathy. ‘It’s my cross,’ Eddie would say with gloomy relish, and sometimes he would even add: ‘Suffering is good for the soul.’
‘It’s clergymen like Eddie Hoffenberg,’ I had said once to Primrose, ‘who make Christianity look like an exercise in masochism.’
‘It’s Germans like Eddie Hoffenberg,’ said Primrose, ‘who encourage the belief that we were doing them a favour by trying to kill them in the war.’
However although there was no denying that Eddie was a German, he was hardly typical of Hitler’s so-called master race, and the fact that he had eventually acquired British citizenship marked him out as a very unusual German indeed. He was tall, bald and bespectacled; his faintly Semitic cast of features had caused him to be bullied by Aryan monsters in the Nazi army, but since he had no Jewish blood in him, this experience had provided him with additional evidence that he was doomed to special suffering. Fortunately his army career had been brief. In 1944 at the age of twenty he had been captured by the British in Normandy, imported to England and dumped in a prison camp on Starbury Plain. Two weeks later Aysgarth, then Archdeacon of Starbridge, had paid a pastoral visit to the camp and naturally Eddie had been quite unable to resist the opportunity to moan to him about how awful life was.
It was not difficult to understand why Eddie had chosen to adopt Aysgarth as a hero, but it was far harder to understand why Aysgarth had chosen to return Eddie’s devotion. ‘Aysgarth has five sons,’ my father remarked once to my mother. Why should he want to play the father to a Teutonic disaster who’s perpetually encased in gloom?’ My mother had no answer, but Primrose eventually produced an explanation. ‘Eddie changed Father’s life,’ she told me. ‘It was Eddie who wrote to Bishop Bell and said how wonderful Father was with the POWs, and since that letter led to Father’s vital friendship with Bell, Father can’t help being sentimental about Eddie and regarding him as a mascot.’
Eddie came from Dresden, which had been devastated by fire-bombing in 1945– None of his family had survived. After the war he had quickly reached the decision that he had to begin a new life elsewhere, and when he thought of the one friend he still possessed he sought Aysgarth’s help. Aysgarth encouraged him to be a clergyman. Eddie had been a Lutheran once, but that was in the old, vanished life. Once Aysgarth had extracted the necessary money from the new Anglo-German Churchmen’s Fellowship, Eddie began his studies at the Starbridge Theological College and spent his holidays with the Aysgarths in London.
Ordination as a clergyman of the Church of England followed and a curacy was squeezed out of a Westminster parish. (A German was lucky to get any job in Westminster, but the Bishop of London caved in after Aysgarth and Bell staged a joint assault.) When Aysgarth became Dean of Starbridge he at once approached the new bishop on Eddie’s behalf, and Dr Ashworth, striving to exercise a Christian spirit after his own years as a POW, proved unwilling to make any move which could be construed as anti-German. Possibly he also saw the chance of unloading his current diocesan problem, a seedy Starbridge parish in the area of the city known as Langley Bottom where there was a run-down Victorian monster of a church, an equally run-down Victorian monster of a vicarage and a working-class congregation of twenty.
Eddie the masochist embraced this challenge with zest. Having been trained at the Starbridge Theological College in its Ango-Catholic heyday under Nick’s father Jonathan Darrow, he had no hesitation in resorting to the most florid ritualism (traditionally popular among the religious members of the working classes), and before long the parish was rising from the dead. Consolidating his success Eddie slaved on, organising clubs, running Bible classes, raising money. The parishioners, who had at first regarded him with suspicion, came to the conclusion they preferred the attentions of a foreigner, even a German foreigner, to the ministrations of some toffee-nosed English gentleman who had been educated at a public school. (The plebs are such dreadful snobs.) Eddie flourished. The parish boomed. The Bishop was both amazed and admiring. When a residentiary canonry at last fell vacant at the Cathedral, he had no objection to Aysgarth’s suggestion that Eddie’s talents should now be employed in a more elevated sphere, and so Eddie became a canon, working hard at his Chapter duties and beavering away on various diocesan committees. He had arrived. Franz Eduard Hoffenberg, that pathetic young German prisoner of war, had been transformed into a pillar of the English ecclesiastical establishment. All he now had to do was live happily ever after.
Of course being Eddie he remained gloomy but it was impossible for him to dispute that his life was now very comfortable. He had a snug little house in the Close, a surrogate family, the Aysgarths, a reasonable income and a pleasant amount of prestige. No one was surprised when he made a success of the canonry. Discarding without difficulty the Anglo-Catholic trappings which he had used to conquer Langley Bottom, he fitted easily into the Cathedral’s middle-of-the-road pattern of worship. In theological matters he was more conservative than his hero, but like Aysgarth he was an idealist prone to talk soppily about the brotherhood of man when he had downed a couple of drinks. His odd, ungainly, pear-shaped figure was always carefully dressed. He observed English customs rigorously, even declaring how devoted he was to Walls’ pork sausages and Dickens when we all knew he must be hankering for bratwürst and Goethe. Priding himself on his mastery of slang he spoke English almost flawlessly except when he began to ponder on the mystery of suffering. Those were the occasions when I thought he was a joke. Otherwise I just thought he was a thundering bore.
As we encountered each other outside the Deanery that afternoon I inwardly recoiled but nevertheless achieved a passable smile.
‘Hi Eddie,’ I said and automatically added: ‘How are you?’ but that was a mistake. One never asked Eddie how he was. He was all too likely to reply in excruciating detail.
‘Well, as a matter of fact my back’s playing me up again,’ he began, ‘but I’ve found this wonderful osteopath who –’
‘Super! Is the Dean in?’
‘Yes, but we’re just off to evensong. I say, Venetia, I had no idea you were about to visit the Aysgarths!’
‘Ah well, ignorance is bliss, as the saying goes …’ I was trying to edge past him but his bulk was blocking the way. The Deanery, a rambling medieval concoction enhanced by Georgian meddling, had no formal drive up to the front door; instead a pebbled lane at the side of the house led to the old stables, while a flagstone path flanked with lavender bushes led through the front garden. Eddie was planted on the flagstones and I was trying to slink past the lavender.
‘Are you here for long?’ Eddie was enquiring, apparently unaware of my attempts at circumnavigation.
‘No, I’m heading for Oxford.’
The front door swung wide. ‘Venetia!’ cried Aysgarth in delight. ‘What a marvellous surprise!’
‘Mr Dean!’ I said as my spirits soared, and firmly pushing my way past Eddie I clasped Aysgarth’s outstretched hand.
VI
‘Must see you!’ I hissed. ‘Top secret!’
His bright blue eyes at once became brighter and bluer. He loved being conspiratorial with young women. ‘You go on ahead,’ he called to Eddie. ‘I’ll catch you up.’
‘We’re late already, Stephen –’
‘I’ll run all the way to the vestry!’ said Aysgarth lightly, and with reluctance Eddie sloped off through the front gate.
Wasting no time I said: ‘I’ve left home and I need advice. Any chance of a quick word without half the Close breathing down our necks?’
‘Meet me in the cloisters after evensong.’
‘Wonderful! Thanks so much … In that case I might as well go to evensong, mightn’t I?’
‘Why not?’ said the Dean amused. ‘It would help to pass the time!’
As it occurred to me that Dr Ashworth would have responded far more coolly to my lukewarm attitude to worship I exclaimed: ‘How glad I am you’re not the Bishop! I’ve just been hobnobbing with him at the South Canonry.’
‘How on earth did you end up there?’
‘I got mixed up with Charley on the train. Mr Dean, what do you think of Honest to God?’
‘Superb! Quite splendid! A breath of fresh air sweeping through the Church of England!’
‘Yes, I thought it probably was. The Bishop’s decided it’s absolutely the bottom.’
‘The trouble with Charles,’ said Aysgarth as we left the garden, crossed Canonry Drive and entered the churchyard of the Cathedral, ‘is that he was trained as a theologian. Such a pity! A theologian’s approach to religion is nearly always much too cerebral and he inevitably becomes cut off from ordinary believers.’
‘But isn’t this book supposed to be bad for ordinary believers?’
‘Rubbish! It’s the best thing that’s happened to them for years. Robinson’s realised that the ordinary believers are waiting for a new comprehensible interpretation of Christianity which will relate to the lives they’re living right now in the 1960s – they’re not waiting for cerebral restatements by theologians in their dead, dry, alienating academic language!’
‘But if the book’s too radical –’
‘Nothing could be too radical! Let’s have this New Reformation Robinson talks about! Let’s have this New Morality! Now that we’re finally emerging from the long shadow of the war and shedding the millstone of the Empire, we need to celebrate our psychological liberation by making everything new – so why not start by flinging religion into the melting-pot, as Robinson suggests, and recasting our beliefs in a bold, creative dynamic style that’s thoroughly attuned to our day and age?’
I began to feel excited – insofar as one can ever feel excited about a subject such as theology. I was, in fact, very much in the mood for revolution and I deeply fancied the thought of an iconoclastic assault on any part of the established order. ‘Long live Bishop John Robinson!’ I declared, making Aysgarth laugh, and we quickened our pace across the sward to the Cathedral.
VII
At the north porch we parted, Aysgarth walking on to the Dean’s door, the special entrance for the clergy, and I wandering through the porch into the nave. A sidesman showed me to a seat in the choir. This was not an unusual favour to bestow prior to a weekday service when few laymen would be present, but nevertheless it made me feel privileged.
The Cathedral was quiet. By that time the tourists had left and it had reverted to the inhabitants of Starbridge, most of whom preferred to admire it loyally from afar. However the congregation did eventually mount to thirty. I sat gazing up at the vaulted ceiling and trying to think noble thoughts, but I was pondering on Mrs Ashworth’s advice about eye make-up when the organ marked the beginning of the service.
I liked the weekday choral evensong. It required no effort apart from kneeling down and standing up at regular intervals, and there was no sermon either to stretch the brain or induce rigor mortis. The choirboys sang in their unearthly voices; the vicars-choral bayed with authority; the vergers marched around providing touches of ceremonial; the clergy lolled meditatively in their stalls. I thought it was all so luxuriously restful, like a hot bath garnished with an expensive perfume, and as I watched the sun slant through the great west window I thought how clever God was to have invented the Church of England, that national monument dedicated to purveying religion in such an exquisitely civilised form.
Aysgarth was looking untidy as usual. His shop-soiled white hair always seemed to need trimming. Wearing a dignified expression he rose to his feet to read the lessons, while in the intervals Eddie, crammed into his canon’s stall at the other end of the choir, intoned the versicles and recited the prayers. I was always surprised by how well Eddie did this, but no doubt Aysgarth had trained him not to sound as if he was fathoms deep in depression. Aysgarth himself read the lessons beautifully in his deep, resonant voice. In fact I was so busy thinking how well he read that I forgot to listen to what he was reading. Appalled by my lack of concentration I was on the point of making a new attempt to focus my mind on the service when I saw Nick Darrow staring at me from the opposite side of the choir. I supposed I had been too busy thinking about eye make-up to notice him earlier.
As soon as our glances met he looked away but I went on watching him and wondering if he was destined to be my lucky mascot. But mascot seemed the wrong word to describe someone like Nick. It was too cosy, too banal. For Nick Darrow I needed a word which implied magic, extraordinary happenings, paranormal phenomena –
‘Ah-ah-ah-men!’ sang the choir, winding up the service.
The organ trilled and fell silent for a moment before embarking on a fugue. Everyone hauled themselves to their feet. The choir tripped out jauntily, mission accomplished, and the clergy followed, looking inscrutable. Aysgarth never once glanced in my direction.
Wandering towards the transept I found Nick had fallen into step beside me.
‘Ah!’ I said, finally grasping the word I wanted. ‘It’s my Talisman! I shouldn’t be surprised to see you again, should I, but why are you on your own?’
‘Charley’s busy with his father.’
‘Mrs Ashworth was telling me about yours. I hear he’s very old.’
‘Yes, but he’s okay.’
‘How old is “old” exactly?’
‘He’ll be eighty-three in May. But he’s okay.’
‘Compos mentis?’
‘Yep.’
‘Super! I often think my father’s mad as a hatter. Is your father able to do much?’
‘Yep. He prays.’
‘Ah. All the time?’
‘No, he does see people occasionally.’
‘He sounds like a hermit!’
‘He is a hermit. But he doesn’t mind me being with him because we don’t have to talk.’
I suddenly realised I was gazing at him as if he were a creature from another planet. ‘How restful!’ I said, not sure what to say. ‘My father’s the very reverse of a silent hermit!’
‘He might become one later. My father only became a recluse after my mother died.’ He turned abruptly towards the nave. ‘So long.’
‘When are we due to meet again?’
He shrugged and walked away.
I gazed after him in fascination. Then heaving open the massive door in the south transept I passed at last into the cloisters.
VIII
In the centre of the quadrangle lay the lawn beneath which in previous centuries the eminent men of Starbridge had been buried, and overshadowing this ancient graveyard an enormous cedar tree towered above the roof of the colonnade. There was a faint breeze. The cedar’s dark upper branches were stirring against the pale, limpid sky.
I was still gazing at this tranquil scene when the door creaked behind me and Aysgarth slipped out of the transept. Unlike Dr Ashworth he had entirely rejected the archaic uniform of a senior churchman, but perhaps that was less because he wanted to be modern than because his thickset figure was unsuited to fancy dress. On that evening he was wearing a black suit, slightly crumpled, and the black clerical ‘stock’ which was worn over an ordinary shirt and secured by ties at the back beneath the jacket. He had no pectoral cross; he belonged to the generation of Protestant churchmen who thought such papist adornment pardonable only when adopted by bishops. His hair, perhaps disarranged when he had removed his surplice after the service, swooped wildly over his ears in undisciplined wings and bumped against the back of his stiff white clerical collar. He looked like an eccentric scientist who has just made an important discovery.
‘Let’s go and sit on Lady Mary Calthrop-Ponsonby!’ he suggested blithely as I moved to meet him.
‘I beg your pardon, Mr Dean?’
With a laugh he led the way to a wooden seat on the northwestern corner of the lawn, and as I drew closer I saw that the back of the seat bore a brass plaque inscribed: ‘In memory of Lady Mary Calthrop-Ponsonby, 12th February 1857–8th November 1941. “FIGHT THE GOOD FIGHT WITH ALL THY MIGHT.”’
‘Three cheers for Lady Mary,’ I said as we sat down, and told him how I had decided to abandon London in search of a new life. ‘… and I’ve now reached the point where I’m trying to decide what to do next,’ I concluded. ‘Mrs Ashworth thinks I should go to Oxford, park myself on Christian and Katie and wangle my way into their set, but I’m not sure I have the nerve to exploit them so brazenly.’
‘I don’t see why you shouldn’t stay with Christian and Katie for a few days while you decide if Oxford has anything to offer you, but I can’t quite see why Lyle is pointing you in that direction.’
‘She thinks I’d enjoy mixing with an intellectual jeunesse dorée.’
‘On the contrary I think you’d soon be bored stiff with all those academics.’
‘Would I? Are you sure? I just feel that if only I could get in with the right set –’
‘In my experience right sets tend to be much too fast.’
‘When one’s been crawling along like a tortoise, Mr Dean, the idea of pace begins to seem attractive.’
He laughed. ‘Was London really that bad?’
‘Yes, it really was. I’ve been a failure there. Don’t just tell me to go back and try again.’
‘Very well, let’s be more imaginative. This could be a great opportunity for you, Venetia! A fresh start is always a great opportunity, but you should remember that happiness isn’t ultimately dependent on getting in with the right set; it’s about serving God by using your God-given gifts in the best possible way.’
‘I only seem to have a God-given gift for drifting in and out of boring jobs.’
‘It’s obvious that you haven’t yet found your métier, and in my opinion pondering on the right métier, not choosing which city to live in, should actually be your number one concern at the moment. You need to escape to somewhere very quiet and very remote for a few days so that you can ponder in peace and see your situation in perspective … Come on holiday with me after Easter!’
I nearly fell off Lady Mary. ‘What a breathtaking suggestion!’
He laughed again before adding: ‘Dido’s not coming but Eddie’s accompanying me and Primrose is joining us twenty-four hours later. Come up on the Wednesday after Easter with Primrose!’
‘Where’s “up”?’
‘The Outer Hebrides.’
‘IS there an Outer Hebrides?’
‘Apparently. The new Earl of Starmouth has very kindly lent me his hunting-lodge on Harris.’
‘Don’t Elizabeth and Pip want to go?’
‘Dido’s taking them to her sister in Leicestershire where they’ll ride horses with her and be blissfully happy.’
‘Chacun à son goût,’ I said. ‘Personally I’d rather live it up in a Caledonian Shangri-La.’
‘My sentiments exactly!’ said Aysgarth, and as he smiled I suddenly wondered if he, like me, was seizing the chance to escape from intractable private problems.
FOUR (#u1a2015f4-5a4f-576d-b3e6-9f4b56d41963)
‘What is most real to you? What matters most for you? Is it money and what money can buy? I doubt it, deep down. For you know that you can’t take it with you”. And seldom does it bring real happiness. Is it love? That’s a good deal nearer, because it has to do with persons, not things.’
JOHN A. T. ROBINSON
Suffragan Bishop of Woolwich 1559–1969
Writing about Honest to God in the Sunday Mirror, 7th April 1963.
I
After staying the night in Primrose’s flat, I caught a train the next morning to my country home at Flaxton Pauncefoot, a village which lay ten miles from the port of Starmouth in the south of the diocese. Here I sorted out some appropriate clothes for the holiday, selected a couple of books and dumped my current stock of dirty laundry on the housekeeper who returned it, faultlessly washed and ironed, that evening. Nowadays there are very few advantages in being a member of the aristocracy, but at least one never has to worry about laundries. Nor does one have to waste time shopping for food or sweating over a hot stove. I said to the housekeeper: ‘I’d like baked beans on toast with a poached egg on top, and tell Pardoe to look out a half-bottle of that nice St Julien, the one with the picture of the purple vineyard on it.’ That solved the problem of dinner.
Afterwards, greatly fortified, I phoned my mother to inform her I would be heading for the Hebrides, retired to the blue drawing-room where the television set lurked behind a fire-screen, and watched the latest episode of the comedy series Down at the Surgery in which two doctors have their virtue constantly assailed by a stream of diverse nymphomaniacs. The elder doctor was played by Martin Darrow with a professional deftness which prompted me to giggle so hard that I dropped cigarette ash all over the floor. He was far better looking than his young half-brother, but nevertheless I was conscious of the strong resemblance between them. I wondered idly what their father, the ancient hermit, thought of his elder son’s career as a television star.
The next morning I extracted my red MG from the stables, heaved my bags into the back and returned to Primrose’s flat. I had remembered it was Sunday but somehow I managed to arrive too late to attend matins, so taking advantage of the spring sunshine I lounged on the seat in the Deanery’s garden as I waited for everyone to return from the Cathedral. Unfortunately Primrose and the Dean stayed on for the sung Communion service. I should have remembered that possibility and removed myself, but I was still lolling in the sunshine when Dido turned up to torpedo me.
‘So there you are, Venetia! Primrose was under the impression you’d be back in time for matins. I do think you might have telephoned to say you’d be late, but then that’s the upper classes, isn’t it, my dear, always expecting the entire world to fall into step beside them, and personally I’ve always been devoutly thankful that I was merely the daughter of a self-made Scottish millionaire and irredeemably nouveau riche because at least I was taught consideration for others from the cradle. Now –’ She paused for breath as she parked herself purposefully on the bench beside me ‘– I’m so glad I’ve got the chance for a word alone with you, because I think it’s time that an intelligent, honest older woman – and as you know, my dear, I always pride myself on my candour – I think it’s time,’ said Dido, without even pausing for breath after this parenthesis, ‘that I gave you a piece of sensible and I hope not unaffectionate advice – because of course I’m very fond of you, Venetia, just as Stephen is, although I do see all your little faults and foibles rather more clearly than he does, because darling Stephen’s so noble that he always sees the best in everyone, whereas I, being a realist – and I’m always being complimented on my realism – I, being a realist,’ said Dido, battling her way out of the jungle of this monstrous sentence, ‘take a much more pessimistic view of humanity, and having been a rich young girl myself I know all about the pitfalls waiting to ensnare rich young girls who drift around without any proper direction – which brings me to what I want to say.’
I raised an eyebrow and looked hopeful.
‘What you have to do, my dear, is not simply to drift hither and thither like a piece of flotsam – or is it jetsam? – on the sea of life while you dabble in antiques and publishing or sidle off on little holidays to the Hebrides with an elderly clergyman who really should have known better than to invite you – although, of course, I do understand that darling Stephen, so soft-hearted, only wanted to be kind – but I’m afraid he didn’t stop to think, did he, that suggesting a holiday was actually only offering you a way of escaping from your problems, and what you really have to do, Venetia my dear, is not to escape from your problems but to face them. To put matters absolutely candidly, if you can’t find a husband you must find a suitably worthy cause to which you can devote your energies, and quite honestly – and I know it’s unfashionable to say this, but since I always believe in calling a spade a spade –’
I raised the other eyebrow and looked even more hopeful.
‘– I think you need to find God. I began my search for God when I was about your age – it was after my favourite sister died – and once Pd started I was always so cross with myself that I’d never started before because religion’s so absolutely fascinating and I can’t understand why it’s not taught properly in schools, especially when they go to such lengths to teach useless things like algebra and hockey. Anyway, once I’d started looking for God I met Stephen and lived happily ever after, and I think the same sort of thing might happen to you if only you could stop being so self-centred. As it happens I know the most wonderful clergyman in London who specialises in spiritual direction, and I’m quite certain that if I were to ring him up and tell him about you –’
‘How terribly kind of you, Mrs Aysgarth, but I’m afraid I’ve absolutely had it with London.’
‘Oh, that won’t last, you’ll go back, you’re a London person. Now my dear, I do hope you’re not thinking that darling Stephen will give you spiritual direction in the Hebrides, because Stephen’s not at all spiritual on holiday, he just likes to sit around eating and drinking and reading detective stories, and I honestly think he’d be most put out if you started chatting to him about God. Anyway, Stephen really can’t start giving spiritual direction to young girls, even here in Starbridge, because he’s much too busy running the Cathedral and keeping the Chapter from murdering each other, and even if he wasn’t much too busy he prefers to exercise his pastoral skills these days among men – and usually German men, as Eddie Hoffenberg will be the first to tell you. And talking of Eddie, I do think you might be kinder to him, he’s such a nice man and he’s had such awful tragedies in his life and he just doesn’t deserve to have you and Primrose poking fun at him behind his back. God only knows what the two of you will get up to in the Hebrides – I can just see you egging each other on and smirking in corners—and in fact to be quite candid and to cut a long story short, I think this holiday is a thoroughly bad idea for all concerned. Why don’t you and Primrose run off to Cornwall and leave those two clergymen to recharge their spiritual batteries in peace?’
‘I don’t think Primrose would care for that idea at all, Mrs Aysgarth.’
‘Oh, Primrose! If that girl were to spend a little less time doting on her father and a little more time being nice to Maurice Tait her life would be vastly improved – and so, God knows, would mine! In fact in my opinion you’d be doing us all the biggest possible favour, Venetia my dear, if you lured Primrose away to – no, not Cornwall, too unoriginal, how about the French Riviera? Take her to your sister’s villa at Juan-les-Pins!’
‘I don’t like the French Riviera.’
‘Well, you certainly won’t like the Hebrides. Dr Johnson thought it was quite awful, he told Boswell so.’
‘I don’t like Dr Johnson.’
‘Venetia dear, don’t you think you’re being just the teensiest bit negative?’
‘I’m sorry, Mrs Aysgarth. It really is so kind of you to worry about my spiritual welfare, and I’ll think very carefully about everything you’ve said, I promise.’
We looked at each other. Her hard dark eyes bore a sharp, shrewd, sceptical expression, and although I tried to exude a docile respect I knew she was not deceived. Rising to her feet abruptly she said: ‘I must see about lunch. Why don’t you come indoors and have a chat with Elizabeth? She always feels so hurt when you and Primrose go out of your way to ignore her.’
Smiling meekly but seething with rage I followed her into the house to talk to her daughter.
II
Primrose usually ate her meals in her flat, but for Sunday lunch, that sacred British institution, she joined her family in the Deanery dining-room, and on that Sunday before Easter I sat with her at the long table. As usual on such occasions, a crowd turned up. In addition to Dido’s two children – not only Elizabeth, who was now a precocious fourteen, but little Pip, who was a nine-year-old pupil at the Choir School – there was a female called Miss Carp, known within the family as Polly (in memory of Polycarp, a bishop of the Early Church); she kept the household running while Dido poked her nose into everyone else’s business, popped up to London to patronise Harrods and pampered herself with the occasional attack of nervous exhaustion, a condition which Primrose described as ‘sheer bloodyminded self-indulgence’. There had been a succession of au pair girls who had looked after the children, but these creatures had been dispensed with once Pip had begun his career at the Choir School.
The other guests at lunch that day consisted of Aysgarth’s second son by his first marriage, Norman, who lectured in law at King’s College, London, Norman’s wife Cynthia who always looked as if she might sleep with everyone in sight but probably never did (although my sister Arabella always said Cynthia was the vainest, most sex-mad girl she ever met – and coming from Absolutely-the-Bottom Arabella that was really something), Aysgarth’s third son James, the jolly Guardsman who was so good at talking about nothing, James’s girlfriend, whose name I failed to catch although it was probably Tracy or Marilyn or something non-U, Aysgarth’s fourth and final son by his first marriage, Alexander, known as Sandy, who was doing postgraduate work up at Oxford, a chum of Sandy’s called Boodle (I never found out his real name either), two elderly female cousins of Dido’s from Edinburgh who appeared to be quite overwhelmed by all the English, Primrose, me and – inevitably – Aysgarth’s most devoted hanger-on, Eddie Hoffenberg. The two people whom I most wanted to see – Aysgarth’s eldest son Christian and his wife – were conspicuous by their absence.
‘They were here last weekend,’ explained Primrose.
All Aysgarth’s children visited their home regularly and all appeared to get on well with their father who was unfailingly benevolent to them. The contrast with my own family could hardly have been more marked. My elder brother Harold was too stupid to hold my father’s attention for long, and although my brother Oliver was no fool – no genius but no fool – he too was uninterested in intellectual matters. Henrietta, Arabella and Sylvia could only be regarded by my father as pretty little playthings. I drove him up the wall. In consequence family gatherings were notable for my father’s impatience and irritability, my mother’s valiant efforts to pour oil on troubled waters, and my siblings muttering to one another in corners that ‘Pater’ really was getting a bit much and Mama had to be some kind of saint to stand him and only a liberal supply of champagne could save everyone from going completely and utterly bonkers.
At the Aysgarths’ lunch that day everyone talked animatedly, Dido inflicting her usual outrageous monologues on her defenceless cousins – with occasional asides to Eddie Hoffenberg who took seriously his Christian obligation to be charitable – Norman commenting on some judge named Denning (this was just before the Profumo affair made Denning famous), Cynthia describing the work of some besotted artist who yearned to paint her portrait, James saying: ‘Realty? How splendid!’ at intervals, Sandy and Boodle arguing over the finer points of Plato’s Dialogue on the Soul, Elizabeth throwing out the information that actually she was an Aristotelian and that Plato simply rang no bells for her at all, Primrose arguing that the whole trouble with the Roman Church was that St Thomas Aquinas had based his Summa on Aristotle’s philosophy, and my Mr Dean chipping in to observe that the world was always divided into Aristotelians and Platonists, and wasn’t the treacle tart absolutely first-class. In the midst of all these stimulating verbal fireworks, little Pip, who was sitting thoughtfully on my left, turned to me and said: ‘Do you like the Beatles, Venetia?’
‘They’re a little young for me, Pip, but I liked “Love Me Do”.’
‘I think they’re fab,’ said Pip. ‘Much better than Plato or Aristotle.’
One of the most attractive aspects of life with the Aysgarths was the wide range of the topics discussed. I doubt if my parents and siblings had heard of the Beatles in the spring of ’sixty-three.
Later in the drawing-room I had an interesting talk about politics with Norman but Cynthia became jealous and winkled him away from me. By this time the Dean had shut himself in his study for his post-prandial snooze, but Eddie Hoffenberg was still hovering as if eager to tell me about his osteopath, so I slipped away to take refuge in Primrose’s flat. Primrose herself had departed after lunch with her boyfriend Maurice Tait, one of the vicars-choral who sang tenor in the Cathedral choir and taught at the Choir School. In fact she cared little for Tait (a damp, limp individual whose hobbies were stamp-collecting and supporting the Bible Reading Fellowship) but she liked to keep him around so that she could talk about ‘my boyfriend’ and look worldly. I didn’t despise her for this. I wouldn’t have minded a neutral escort myself, if only to silence the fiends who muttered: ‘Poor old Venetia!’ behind my back, but no limp, damp individual had presented himself for acquisition. I didn’t count Eddie, of course. Not only was his Wagnerian gloom intolerable but he was so ugly that if I had accepted him as an escort the fiends would merely have gone on muttering: ‘Poor old Venetia!’
I also had to face the fact – an unpalatable one for my ego – that Eddie had never actually tried to do more than trap me in corners and talk about his health. He had never invited me to his house on my own or suggested a visit to the cinema – or even invited me for a walk on a Sunday afternoon. Tait always took Primrose for a walk down by the water-meadows after he had lunched with his mother. Primrose would sigh beforehand and say what a bore these walks were, but I suspected that if Tait had failed to appear one Sunday she would have been very cross indeed.
The rest of the day passed most agreeably, providing a tantalising glimpse of what fun life could be when one was accepted by a group of congenial people; at least at the Aysgarths’ house I was never left out in the cold. After tea we all played croquet and I beat everyone except Boodle. There was much laughter as we languished on the lawn. Then having completed my odyssey among the croquet hoops I ate baked beans on toast with Primrose in her flat and we discussed Life, a ritual which involved reviewing the day’s events, pulling everyone to pieces, putting a few favoured individuals together again and tossing the rest on the scrap-heap. This was fun. Primrose had her faults (priggishness, intolerance, intellectual snobbishness) but she was witty and seldom bored me. I only became bored when she was either talking soppily about her father or droning drearily about her work at the diocesan office on Eternity Street. Every time she began a sentence with the words The Archdeacon and F, my teeth automatically gritted themselves, so when at ten o’clock that evening the dread words tripped off her tongue I waited until she had finished her sentence and then immediately asked if I could have a bath. Half an hour later I was stretched out on the Put-U-Up sofa, now transformed into a bed, and tuning into Radio Luxemburg on my transistor.
‘Good heavens, Vinnie!’ exclaimed Primrose, appearing crossly in curlers as I was smoking a final cigarette and wriggling my toes in time to Elvis Presley. ‘You’re not still listening to that drivel, are you? I can’t understand why you’re so keen on pop music!’
‘No, you wouldn’t. You’re not fundamentally interested in sex.’
‘Honestly, Venetia! What a thing to say!’ She flounced back to her bedroom.
Elvis quivered on vibrantly. As I stubbed out my cigarette I wondered – not for the first time – if anyone would ever invite me to have sexual intercourse, but it seemed like a forlorn hope. Switching off the transistor I pulled the bed-clothes over my head and allowed myself to shed a single furious tear of despair.
III
Easter was the following weekend. In the interval I loafed, smoked and vegetated, unwilling to think deeply about the future and telling myself I needed a few days of absolute rest in order to recuperate from the horrors of London life. I did toy with the idea of reading Honest to God but the desire to escape from my problems by being intellectually mindless was so strong that I could only reread Primrose’s childhood collection of Chalet School books.
Finally I was roused from my torpor by the spectacle of Easter in a great cathedral. I avoided the Good Friday services but attended matins on Sunday morning and was rewarded when Aysgarth preached a most interesting sermon about how Christianity was all set to undergo a dynamic resurrection, recast and restated for the modern age. The Bishop, who was ensconced in his cathedra at one end of the choir, spent much time gazing up at the east window as if he were wondering how it could possibly be cleaned.
The next day Aysgarth was obliged to supervise the conclusion of the special services, but on Tuesday he was free to depart for the Hebrides; he and Eddie planned to drive to Heathrow airport and leave the car in the long-term car-park. At half-past eight that morning after Primrose had departed for her office I wandered across the courtyard of the stables to say goodbye to him, but no sooner had I entered the house by the side-door than I heard Dido’s voice, throbbing with emotion, in the hall. Automatically I stopped dead. I was still well out of sight beyond the stairs.
‘… I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I absolutely swore I wouldn’t break down like this, but I do so wish you were coming to Leicestershire – I know horses bore you, but you could read quietly in the library and –’
‘Darling –’
‘– and at least you’d be there. I just think it’s so sad for Elizabeth and Pip that we’re never together on our own as a family –’
‘But that’s not true!’
‘Not on our own, Stephen – there’s always someone from your first marriage there – all right, we won’t talk of Primrose, but it just seems so wrong that we’re not going to be together –’
‘But when Lord Starmouth offered me the lodge the first thing I did was ask you to come with me!’
‘How could I when I’m ill every time I try to go in a plane?’
‘I was quite prepared to go overland, but since you were adamant that nothing would induce you to go to the Hebrides –’
‘I thought you’d back down and come to Leicestershire. I never dreamed you’d run off instead with Primrose and Eddie and – my God! – Venetia –’
‘What’s wrong with Venetia? Isn’t she Primrose’s best friend and the daughter of one of my own oldest friends?’
‘I don’t give a damn who she is, that girl’s sly, not to be trusted, a trouble-maker –’
‘My dearest, I really don’t think this conversation does you justice –’
‘Oh, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, it’s just that I feel so depressed, so alone, so utterly abandoned –’
There was a silence. I guessed he had been driven to silence her with an embrace. Pressing my back against the wall of the passage I held my breath and waited until at last she said tearfully: ‘How I hate separations!’
‘I’ll write every day.’
‘If only there was a phone at this stupid place –’
‘I’ll try and phone from the nearest village.’
‘Promise?’
‘Of course I promise.’
‘Oh Stephen …’ Another silence elapsed before Aysgarth said abruptly: ‘Here’s Eddie with the car. Quick, take my handkerchief and dry your eyes – where are the children?’
‘I don’t know … Elizabeth! Pip! Your father’s leaving!’
At once I slipped silently away.
IV
Primrose and I began our journey north twenty-four hours later after the day-long diocesan conference of the Young Christians for Peace, an event which Primrose had helped to organise and which apparently could not take place without her. Primrose had always been an enthusiastic organiser. She had acquired the taste for power when she had become a Girl Guide leader, and since then the local branches of the Student Christian Movement, the Bible Reading Fellowship, the Missions to Africa Fund and the Inter-Faith League had all benefited from her efficient interference.
‘You really ought to get interested in some worthwhile cause, Venetia!’ she exclaimed as she returned, flushed with triumph, from her conference. ‘If I were to do nothing but read dated schoolgirl books, watch television and listen to Radio Lux., I’d go mad in no time!’
I refrained from argument; I was all for a quiet life, and since I was a guest in her flat I had a moral obligation to be docile, but I realised then that Mrs Ashworth had been correct in deducing that Primrose and I had reached the parting of the ways.
Meanwhile we had to go on holiday together. Driving to Heathrow in my MG we caught a late-morning flight to Glasgow and arrived in the town of Stornoway, the capital of the Outer Hebrides, in the middle of the afternoon. Although it was the largest settlement on the island of Lewis and Harris, the town was small and the airport was primitive. On stepping out of the little plane I felt a soft damp wind on my cheek. A vast vista of white clouds and green treeless wastes stretched before me, but when I had an immediate impression not of desolation but of peace I realised my mood of torpor was at last beginning to dissolve.
‘There’s Eddie,’ said Primrose.
Eddie’s ungainly figure was clad in the English holiday uniform of grey trousers, a casual shirt and a tweed jacket, but he still managed to look like a foreigner; the uniform was much too well-tailored. He was driving a hired car, a faded white Morris which had seen better days but which bucketed along the narrow roads with surprising spirit. Lewis, I realised as I stared out of the window later at Harris, was the tame, domesticated part of the island. Harris was all bare hills and sinister peat-bogs and glowering little lakes with hardly a croft in sight. Yet I was intrigued. It seemed light years away from London, and beyond the village of Tarbert we appeared to leave civilisation behind completely. A single-track road adorned with the occasional hardy weed wound through brutal hills. Now and then the sea was visible as a lurid strip of midnight blue. Squalls of rain swooped down from the hills and swept away along the coast. Rainbows appeared fleetingly during improbable bursts of sunshine. The car groaned but battled on. I began to be excited.
‘Is there really anything at the end of this road, Eddie?’
‘Wait and see!’ He pulled the car round a hairpin bend, and a second later Primrose and I were both exclaiming in wonder. Before us lay a small bay, shaped like a crescent moon and fringed with pale sand. Overlooking this idyllic seascape stood an Edwardian house, not too big but solid and well-proportioned. Beyond a walled garden the brown-green moors, dotted with rocks, rose towards mountains capped by cloud.
‘Just like Wuthering Heights!’ remarked Primrose. True romantic isolation! All we need now is Heathcliff.’
The front door opened as if on cue, and the Dean of Starbridge stepped out into the porch to welcome us.
V
Despite its remoteness the house turned out to be very comfortable, in that plain tasteful style that always costs a lot of money, and this comfort was enhanced by a married couple who did all the boring things such as cooking, shopping, cleaning and keeping the peat fires burning. At that time of the year in the far north the weather was still cold, particularly in the evenings, but having spent so much of my life at Flaxton Hall, where the heating was either non-existent or modest, I took the chill in my stride. In contrast, wretched Eddie was soon complaining of rheumatic twinges and saying that whenever he was in pain he was convinced he was going to die young.
‘In that case,’ said Primrose, ‘please do die now and save us from listening to any more of your moans,’ but at that point Aysgarth intervened, reminding Eddie lightly that life had been much worse in the POW camp on Starbury Plain and begging Primrose not to encourage anyone to die because it would be so annoying to have to cut short the holiday.
Our days in the wilderness began with breakfast at nine. Eddie then walked to the village and collected the specially ordered copy of The Times; on his return he studied it for twenty minutes. Another brisk trot followed, this time up and down the beach, but finally he allowed himself to relax in the morning-room with The Brothers Karamazov.
In contrast Aysgarth followed quite a different pattern of activity. After breakfast he sat in the drawing-room for a while and gazed at the sea. Then he dipped into one of his newly-purchased paperbacks (all detective stories) and read a few pages. More sea-gazing followed but at last he roused himself sufficiently to pen a letter to his wife. (‘The daily chore,’ commented Primrose to me once in a grim aside.) By the time the letter was finished Eddie had returned from the village but Aysgarth refused to read the newspaper in detail after Eddie had discarded it; he merely glanced at the headlines and tried to do the crossword. Despite his intellect he was very bad at crosswords, almost as bad as he was at bridge, and had to be helped by Primrose and me. The completion of the puzzle took at least twice as long as it should have done because we all spent so much time laughing, but once the last letter had been pencilled in Aysgarth invariably announced with regret: ‘I suppose I ought to take some exercise.’ He then staggered outside, inhaled deeply a few times and staggered back indoors again. As soon as the clock in the hall chimed twelve he declared it was time for drinks. Eddie, who preferred to abstain from alcohol till the evening, remained in the morning-room with The Brothers Karamazov but Aysgarth and I would swill champagne while Primrose toyed with her customary glass of dry sherry.
At some time during the morning Primrose and I would have been out, either scrambling along the rocky coast or following the path up into the stark wild hills. It rained regularly, but since we always wore macks and sou’westers the weather was never a serious inconvenience. Besides, the rain never lasted long. When the sun did shine we continually marvelled at the colours around us: the sea was a sapphire blue, the waves bright white, the sands dark cream, the moors green-brown mixed with ash-grey rock. Primrose took numerous photographs while I tried to impress the scenes on my memory and wished I could paint. Often as we scrambled along the low cliffs we saw seals playing near the beach, and several times in the hills we glimpsed deer. There were never any people. As the days passed my sense of peace increased until I even began to wish I could have been one of those ancient Celtic saints, dedicated to a solitary life in a remote and beautiful place in order to worship God. At least I would have been spared the rat-race in London and the hell of attending the Great Party of Life as a wallflower.
After lunch every day Aysgarth retired for ‘forty winks’, which usually lasted half an hour, Primrose and I read The Times and Eddie wrote letters. Then at three o’clock we departed with a picnic tea for an outing in the car. All over the long island we rambled; on two consecutive days we stopped on the road to Leverburgh at a point above the vast sands which stretched across the bay towards the distant range of blue mountains, and twice we visited the remote church at Rodel on the southernmost tip of Harris. Then I, who was so very bad at worship and so very reluctant to be ‘churchy’, found myself thinking of Jesus Christ, living thousands of miles away in another culture in another millennium, writing nothing, completing his life’s work in three years, a failure by worldly standards, dying an ignoble death – yet still alive in the little church at Rodel on the remotest edge of Europe, still alive for his millions upon millions of followers worldwide, not a despised, rejected failure any more but acknowledged even by non-Christians as one of the greatest men who had ever lived, etched deep on the consciousness of humanity and expressing his mysterious message of regeneration in that most enigmatic of all symbols, the cross.
‘What are you thinking about, Venetia?’ said that pest Eddie, ruining my rare moment of feeling religious as I stood staring at the church.
‘Elvis Presley,’ I said to shut him up. Eddie loathed pop music.
By then I was missing my daily dose of the pops on Radio Luxemburg which seemed to be unobtainable in the Hebrides; perhaps the weather conditions were unfavourable – or perhaps Luxemburg was merely too far away. The BBC in those days devoted little time to musical trivia so my deprivation was severe, but on the other hand there was little time to tune into the wireless. When we returned from our picnic the moment had arrived for a gin-and-tonic for me, whisky for the men and another glass of sherry for Primrose. During dinner we sampled a claret or a white burgundy – or possibly, depending on the menu, both; Aysgarth was taking seriously his absent host’s invitation that we should help ourselves to his well-stocked cellar. After dinner we played bridge or, if we were feeling frivolous, vingt-et-un. Conversation, spiked by all the drink, sparkled. Even Eddie shuddered with mirth occasionally.
‘Father,’ said Primrose late one evening after Eddie had scooped the pool of matchsticks at vingt-et-un and Aysgarth had suggested a nightcap of brandy, ‘isn’t this holiday turning into a distinctly Bacchanalian orgy?’
‘I hope so!’ said Aysgarth amused.
‘So do I!’ I said at once. ‘Primrose, these poor clergymen spend months on end being saintly and strait-laced – why on earth shouldn’t they let their hair down on holiday?’
That idiotic Eddie was unable to resist sighing: ‘“Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die.”’
‘Well, I’m not dying yet!’ declared Aysgarth robustly. ‘I’ve still got a lot of living to do!’
A chord twanged in my memory. ‘“I’ve gotta – whole lotta living to do!”’ I sang, imitating Presley. ‘“Whole lotta loving to do – and there’s-uh no one-uh who I’d rather do it-uh with-uh than you – COME ON, BABY!”’
‘Venetia!’ exclaimed Eddie, appalled by the vulgarity, his eyes almost popping out of his head.
‘Venetia!’ cried Primrose scandalised, casting an embarrassed glance at her father.
‘What a splendid song!’ said my Mr Dean naughtily, unable to resist the urge to shock them still further. ‘Does it come from the repertoire of those young men Pip likes so much?’
‘The Beatles? No, it’s an Elvis Presley number.’
‘Ah, Mr Presley! The Bishop thinks his records ought to be banned – which inevitably means they’re first-class fun. “Charles,” I said to him after I’d supported the publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, “the real obscenity in our culture isn’t sex. It’s violence.” But of course he refused to agree. Funny how Charles takes such a dark view of sex – it’s as if he can never forget some very profound sexual sin which affected him personally in some quite unforgettable way.’
‘Isn’t the most likely explanation,’ said Eddie, who had had a good deal to drink, ‘that he had a strong sex drive in his youth and that he was constantly afraid of giving way to temptation?’
‘I don’t know why you throw in the phrase “in his youth”, Eddie!’ said Aysgarth more naughtily than ever. ‘Why shouldn’t he still have a strong sex drive even now he’s past sixty?’
Eddie went pink. Primrose stood up and said brightly: ‘Who’s for cocoa?’
‘I thought we were all going to have a nightcap of brandy,’ I said. ‘Go on, Mr Dean! Do you think the Bishop and Mrs Bishop go in for Lady-Chatterley-style high jinks at the South Canonry?’
‘VENETIA!’ chorused the horrified voices of Canon Hoffenberg and Miss P. Aysgarth, Girl Guide leader.
The Dean could barely speak for laughing but managed to gasp: ‘Eddie, why don’t you keep Primrose company while she goes in search of cocoa? Venetia and I are going to discuss D. H. Lawrence!’
‘This is all your fault, Vinnie,’ said Primrose exasperated. ‘If you hadn’t mentioned Elvis Presley –’
‘I’d very much like to hear this Mr Presley,’ said Aysgarth. ‘Could we tune into Radio Luxemburg on that radiogram in the morning-room?’
‘Not a hope, Mr Dean – unless the reception’s a great deal better tonight than it’s been so far.’
‘Eddie,’ said Primrose, ‘let’s leave them to their decadence.’
Eddie said drunkenly: ‘We draw the line at rock-’n’-roll, Stephen!’ and stalked after her.
‘Snob!’ I shouted after him before adding to Aysgarth: ‘The mystery about that radiogram is that there appear to be no records to go with it. Wouldn’t you think that the Earl’s teenage daughters would keep a supply of old favourites here to wile away the rainy days?’
‘Let’s have a search!’ exclaimed Aysgarth, leaping to his feet.
‘Tally-ho!’ I cried, leading the charge into the hall. Then I stopped. ‘But it’s no good searching the morning-room,’ I said, ‘because I’ve already done that. I’ve searched the drawing-room too. Perhaps the attics –’
‘What about that cupboard over there under the stairs?’
We bowled over to the cupboard and I dived inside.
‘There’s probably a light,’ said Aysgarth as I floundered in the darkness. Thank heavens this place has a generator and we don’t have to rely on candles … ah, well done!’
I had found the light switch and was now surveying a jungle of mackintoshes, Wellington boots and bric-à-brac which stretched far back below the stairs. Ploughing forward I nearly disembowelled myself with a fishing-rod. ‘Bloody hell,’ I muttered before I remembered the Church. ‘Whoops! Sorry, Mr Dean –’
‘Oh, did you speak? I didn’t hear a word.’
The old pet! I adored him. Heaving aside a battalion of boots I struck gold in the form of six cases, all designed to carry records. ‘Eureka!’ I shouted, ripping open the first case of twelve-inch LPs, but found only the Beethoven symphonies with a dash of ‘Swan Lake’. Attacking the second case I glimpsed the word ‘Wagner’ and slammed shut the lid with a shudder.
‘Any luck?’ called Aysgarth excited.
‘Hang on.’ I opened the third case – and there, miraculously, was Presley, glittering in gold lamé and slouched in a pose to launch a thousand screams. ‘Whoopee!’ I yelled and staggered backwards past the macks and wellies with the record-case clasped to my bosom.
‘Jiminy cricket!’ said Aysgarth awed as I showed him the picture on the sleeve.
‘Just you wait, Mr Dean! This is the kind of stuff guaranteed to make the Bishop pass out in the pulpit!’
We plunged into the morning-room where I crammed the LP on to the turntable. Then I hesitated, holding the arm above the revolving disc as I tried to select the most suitable track. I didn’t want to bludgeon him into a coma with ‘Heartbreak Hotel’. A milder introduction seemed called for. Finally the decision was made, and the next moment Presley – Presley before he became decadent and bloated and corrupt – the young, unspoilt, unsurpassable Elvis Presley began to belt out ‘You’re Right, I’m Left, She’s Gone’.
VI
‘This is wonderful!’ cried the Dean. ‘Wonderful!’ And as I lifted the needle from the groove at the end of the track he exclaimed: ‘It makes me want to catch up with all the fun I missed out on in my youth!’
‘Was your youth really so drab?’
‘Drab! That’s an understatement. Primitive Methodists, no money, working day in, day out, in order to get on – why, the most thrilling moment of my youth consisted of a forbidden visit to the cinema where I watched Clara Bow oozing “It” as I sank my teeth into a sinful peppermint cream! Never mind, those times are gone now – and how glad I am that I’ve lived to see the dawn of a new era! Class barriers collapsing, sexual inhibitions being overcome –’
‘Good old Elvis! Want to hear some more?’
‘I want to hear everything! Play that song you were singing at dinner!’
I rummaged around and found it. ‘Okay, Mr Dean!’ I cried. “Off we go!’
The beat began to pound. Presley began to celebrate the joy of life. And suddenly Aysgarth rose to his feet.
‘Isn’t it great?’ I shouted, turning up the volume, but he merely cried enthralled: ‘Let’s dance!’
I kicked off my shoes, we grabbed each other’s hands, he drew me to the centre of the floor. And there, as Elvis Presley sang his heart out and the boards vibrated beneath our feet, I danced with the Dean of Starbridge to the beat of rock-’n’-roll.
VII
As the final chord throbbed and we clutched each other, breathless with laughter, I saw that Primrose and Eddie were standing appalled in the doorway.
‘Honestly!’ said Primrose as I abruptly switched off the radiogram. ‘I’ve never seen anything quite so undignified in all my life!’
‘My dear,’ said her father, ‘you mustn’t be so serious that you forget how to have fun.’
At once Primrose turned her back on us and stalked off across the hall.
‘Leave her to me, Stephen,’ said Eddie. ‘You go on having fun.’ And he too withdrew, closing the door behind him.
‘That’s the nicest thing Eddie’s done in a month of Sundays,’ I said. ‘But why on earth is Prim being so idiotic?’
‘I’m afraid she realised I was cross with her.’
‘Cross? That wasn’t being cross! You should hear my father when he roars like a lion – that’s what being cross is all about!’
‘But Primrose is particularly dependent on me for my love and approval. Ever since her mother died –’
‘But her mother’s been dead for over twenty years – isn’t it time Primrose grew up? God knows, I never thought I’d hear myself say this but sometimes when I see this so-called “dependence” on you I really feel quite sorry for Dido.’
He merely regarded me with grave blue eyes and said nothing.
A panic-stricken remorse assailed me. ‘Sorry,’ I mumbled, furious with myself for plunging around in his family problems like an elephant cavorting among eggshells. ‘Tight as an owl. Rude as hell. Forget I spoke.’
‘My dear Venetia, there’s no need for you to apologise!’ he said at once, sloughing off both my tactlessness and his problems as if they were supremely unimportant. ‘Let’s be tight as owls together and go on having the time of our lives!’ And as he stretched out his hands to me again I was suddenly transported to the very centre of life.
My world turned itself inside out. In a split second of blinding clarity I saw him at last not as the family friend who was always so kind to me, but as the irresistible stranger whose personality, by some great miracle, uniquely complemented my own. My loneliness was annihilated; my despair exploded into a euphoric hope. Knowing I had to withdraw at once before my emotion could utterly overwhelm me, I blundered across the hall to the cloakroom, sagged in tears against the door and mutely contemplated the vastness of my discovery.
VIII
‘Venetia?’
‘Just a sec.’ I pulled the plug of the lavatory and emerged dry-eyed into the hall. As I saw the anxious expression on his face I realised he thought I was suffering from the effects of too much to drink, but although I opened my mouth to reassure him no words came. I was speechless because his entire appearance had changed. His white hair now seemed not shop-soiled but creamily distinguished. His forehead had assumed exactly the right height and breadth to enhance this impression of distinction and his nose, formerly large, had become exquisitely and nobly Roman. The lines on his face no longer suggested antiquity but the power of a fascinating and formidable character. His eyes, radiantly blue and steamily bright, made me feel weak at the knees, while his thin mouth, which turned down slightly at the corners, no longer seemed tough in repose but overpoweringly sultry; I felt weaker at the knees than ever. In fact when he smiled I felt so demolished by his sheer sexual glamour that I actually had to sink down on the hall chest. I had forgotten he was sixty-one. Or, to be accurate, I had not forgotten but the fact no longer had any meaning for me. He could have been twenty-one, forty-one or eighty-one. Such a trivial fact was of no importance. All that mattered was that he was the man I wanted to go to bed with that very night and marry the very next morning.
I suddenly realised he was speaking again. He was saying: ‘How about some black coffee?’ and my voice was replying without a second’s hesitation: ‘I think I’d prefer a very large Rémy Martin.’
He laughed. Then reassured that I was no longer expiring from an excess of alcohol, he vanished into the dining-room to raid the sideboard.
‘What happened?’ he enquired with curiosity as he returned with two brandies and sat down beside me on the hall chest. ‘Were you overwhelmed by Mr Presley?’
‘No, by joie de vivre – and by you, Mr Dean,’ I said, somehow keeping my voice casual. ‘You must be the trendiest dean in Christendom!’
He laughed in delight, and I saw then that his attitude towards me was quite unchanged; untouched by any emotional earthquake he was merely savouring the concluding moments of an entertaining evening. ‘I always regard it as a very great blessing that Pip was born when I was fifty-two,’ he said. ‘He keeps me young in outlook.’
Primrose chose that moment to return to the hall. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to be such a kill-joy, but I genuinely can’t stand that sort of music.’
Aysgarth gave her a kiss to signal that her apology was accepted and asked: ‘Where’s Eddie?’
‘In the drawing-room. He started talking about the decadence of pop music and then before I could stop him he was holding forth on the decadence of Berlin in the ’thirties. I walked out when he began to ruminate on the nature of evil.’
‘I’d better go and rescue him.’
‘Why not just hit him over the head with The Brothers Karamazov? I nearly did.’
They wandered off together to save Eddie from his turgid metaphysics. Knocking back the rest of my brandy I reeled upstairs to my room and passed out in a stupor of alcohol, ecstasy and rampant sexual desire.
FIVE (#u1a2015f4-5a4f-576d-b3e6-9f4b56d41963)
‘The universe, like a human being, is not built merely to a mathematical formula. It’s only love that gives you the deepest due to it.’
JOHN A. T. ROBINSON
Suffragan Bishop of Woolwich 1959–1969
Writing about Honest to God in the Sunday Mirror, 7th April 1963
I
The next day was Sunday and Aysgarth had earlier mentioned that he would be celebrating Communion in the dining-room at eight. Since Eddie and Primrose would inevitably attend the service I had decided I should make the effort to join them, but when Primrose woke me I realised, as my hang-over hit me between the eyes, that my virtuous decision would have to be revoked.
‘There’s something so wonderfully moral about alcohol,’ observed Primrose as I pulled the bed-clothes over my head with a groan. ‘Punishment always follows excess.’
I could have murdered her, but by that time I was too enrapt with my memories of the previous evening to bother. She departed unscathed and immediately the door closed I sat up, ready for Day One of my new life. I tossed off the necessary potion to soothe my liver. Then I flung back the curtains and exclaimed: ‘A celestial day has dawned for Venetia Flaxton!’ Outside it was raining, but who cared? The view, wreathed in shifting mist, seemed more romantic than ever. Sliding back into bed I lit a cigarette, hummed a verse of Presley’s ‘I Need Your Love Tonight’ and prepared for a delicious hour of meditating on the object of my desire.
It was immediately obvious that I could never speak of my love. Since nothing could come of my grand passion there could be no conceivable point in disclosing my feelings, and besides, there was no one in whom I could confide – except Mrs Ashworth, but I could hardly babble to the wife of a bishop about my new-found adulterous lust for a dean.
Having reached this conclusion I perceived a second obvious truth: not only would I have to keep my mouth shut but I would have to rise to great thespian heights to conceal my secret. No one must ever guess the truth because no one would ever understand the height and breadth and depth of my well-nigh incinerating desire. I pictured my siblings sniggering: ‘Poor old Venetia! A crush on an elderly clergyman – whatever will she think of next?’ And as for Primrose … but no, the mind boggled. I had to carry the precious secret to my grave, but I could accept this necessity because I was so happy. I had been granted the power to love; nothing else mattered, and indeed to have wanted more would have been disgustingly greedy. Since it was quite impossible that Aysgarth could fall in love with me it was pointless to hope that my passion might be reciprocated, but I would be blissfully content with his continuing avuncular friendship, and so long as I could live near him, see him regularly and have the occasional little chat about God or Eternity or whatever else might interest him, my life would be indescribably rich and fulfilling.
So be it. I would still die virgo intacta, but having experienced passion on a cosmic scale I could at least tell myself that my years in the world hadn’t been a complete waste of time.
With a sigh I stretched myself luxuriously and decided I was in paradise.
II
My next task was to choose what to wear for Day One of my new life, but all my clothes now seemed so dreary, no more than a drab mass of browns, beiges and moss-greens. Then I remembered the red sweater which I had bought on impulse when I had visited Marks and Spencer’s to replenish my stock of underwear; I had just had a row with my father and was feeling aggressive, but now the scarlet seemed to symbolise not aggression but passion. I selected the sweater and eyed a pair of earth-coloured slacks. Did I dare wear trousers on a Sunday? Yes. I was in the mood to take a scandalous risk. My mother had brainwashed me into thinking slacks were vulgar on any day of the week, but I had long since realised they suited me. I have longish legs and not too much padding around the hips. It was true that I was usually at least seven pounds overweight, but we can’t all be the Duchess of Windsor.
I brushed my horrible hair and clipped it severely behind my ears to curb its tendency to billow around my head in a frizz. Then I slapped on some powder and went wild with the mascara which normally I reserved for evenings. My mother believed only fallen women wore eye make-up during the day, but Mrs Ashworth had confirmed my suspicion that this piece of folklore was out of date. I tried to recall whether Mrs Ashworth herself wore eye make-up but the memory eluded me. Dressing the part of a bishop’s wife, Mrs Ashworth was the kind of clever woman who would spend half an hour making herself up to look as if she was not made up at all.
Did I wear lipstick? No. Lipstick was going out of favour. The ‘look’ consisted of emphasising the eyes and hair. Jewellery? No, quite inappropriate for a Sunday morning in the Hebrides, and anyway I had decided to emulate Mrs Ashworth’s uncluttered simplicity of style. Was I ready? Yes. For anything. Forgetting my liver, which was still feeling a trifle battle-scarred, I sailed downstairs for breakfast just as the clock in the hall chimed nine.
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Susan Howatch
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: The author’s most famous and well-loved work, the Starbridge series, six self-contained yet interconnected novels that explore the history of the Church of England through the 20th century.In 1963, when traditional values are coming under attack, a young woman in her twenties, Venetia Flaxton, becomes disastrously involved with her best friend′s father, the powerful, dynamic but ultimately mysterious Dean of Starbridge Cathedral. Yet, as a married man and a senior Churchman, Aysgarth has nothing to offer her but an admiration which spirals out of control into an obsessive love. As Aysgarth begins to take scandalous risks to further their friendship, pressures rise and the dangers multiply. Venetia finds herself trapped in a desperate web of love and lies from which it seems impossible to escape.Witty, compassionate and compelling, Scandalous Risks explores not only the reality of sin and the fantasy of sexual obsession, but the overpowering human need for redemption, love and lasting happiness.