Kitabı oku: «Scandalous Risks»

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

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

AUTHOR’S NOTE

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PRAISE

ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

PART ONE
THE GARDEN

‘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

‘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

‘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 soprano 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.