Scandalous Risks

‘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

‘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?’