Scandalous Risks

‘I don’t like the French Riviera.’

‘Well, you certainly won’t like the Hebrides. Dr Johnson thought it was quite awful, he told Boswell so.’

‘I don’t like Dr Johnson.’

‘Venetia dear, don’t you think you’re being just the teensiest bit negative?’

‘I’m sorry, Mrs Aysgarth. It really is so kind of you to worry about my spiritual welfare, and I’ll think very carefully about everything you’ve said, I promise.’

We looked at each other. Her hard dark eyes bore a sharp, shrewd, sceptical expression, and although I tried to exude a docile respect I knew she was not deceived. Rising to her feet abruptly she said: ‘I must see about lunch. Why don’t you come indoors and have a chat with Elizabeth? She always feels so hurt when you and Primrose go out of your way to ignore her.’

Smiling meekly but seething with rage I followed her into the house to talk to her daughter.

II

Primrose usually ate her meals in her flat, but for Sunday lunch, that sacred British institution, she joined her family in the Deanery dining-room, and on that Sunday before Easter I sat with her at the long table. As usual on such occasions, a crowd turned up. In addition to Dido’s two children – not only Elizabeth, who was now a precocious fourteen, but little Pip, who was a nine-year-old pupil at the Choir School – there was a female called Miss Carp, known within the family as Polly (in memory of Polycarp, a bishop of the Early Church); she kept the household running while Dido poked her nose into everyone else’s business, popped up to London to patronise Harrods and pampered herself with the occasional attack of nervous exhaustion, a condition which Primrose described as ‘sheer bloodyminded self-indulgence’. There had been a succession of au pair girls who had looked after the children, but these creatures had been dispensed with once Pip had begun his career at the Choir School.

The other guests at lunch that day consisted of Aysgarth’s second son by his first marriage, Norman, who lectured in law at King’s College, London, Norman’s wife Cynthia who always looked as if she might sleep with everyone in sight but probably never did (although my sister Arabella always said Cynthia was the vainest, most sex-mad girl she ever met – and coming from Absolutely-the-Bottom Arabella that was really something), Aysgarth’s third son James, the jolly Guardsman who was so good at talking about nothing, James’s girlfriend, whose name I failed to catch although it was probably Tracy or Marilyn or something non-U, Aysgarth’s fourth and final son by his first marriage, Alexander, known as Sandy, who was doing postgraduate work up at Oxford, a chum of Sandy’s called Boodle (I never found out his real name either), two elderly female cousins of Dido’s from Edinburgh who appeared to be quite overwhelmed by all the English, Primrose, me and – inevitably – Aysgarth’s most devoted hanger-on, Eddie Hoffenberg. The two people whom I most wanted to see – Aysgarth’s eldest son Christian and his wife – were conspicuous by their absence.

‘They were here last weekend,’ explained Primrose.

All Aysgarth’s children visited their home regularly and all appeared to get on well with their father who was unfailingly benevolent to them. The contrast with my own family could hardly have been more marked. My elder brother Harold was too stupid to hold my father’s attention for long, and although my brother Oliver was no fool – no genius but no fool – he too was uninterested in intellectual matters. Henrietta, Arabella and Sylvia could only be regarded by my father as pretty little playthings. I drove him up the wall. In consequence family gatherings were notable for my father’s impatience and irritability, my mother’s valiant efforts to pour oil on troubled waters, and my siblings muttering to one another in corners that ‘Pater’ really was getting a bit much and Mama had to be some kind of saint to stand him and only a liberal supply of champagne could save everyone from going completely and utterly bonkers.

At the Aysgarths’ lunch that day everyone talked animatedly, Dido inflicting her usual outrageous monologues on her defenceless cousins – with occasional asides to Eddie Hoffenberg who took seriously his Christian obligation to be charitable – Norman commenting on some judge named Denning (this was just before the Profumo affair made Denning famous), Cynthia describing the work of some besotted artist who yearned to paint her portrait, James saying: ‘Realty? How splendid!’ at intervals, Sandy and Boodle arguing over the finer points of Plato’s Dialogue on the Soul, Elizabeth throwing out the information that actually she was an Aristotelian and that Plato simply rang no bells for her at all, Primrose arguing that the whole trouble with the Roman Church was that St Thomas Aquinas had based his Summa on Aristotle’s philosophy, and my Mr Dean chipping in to observe that the world was always divided into Aristotelians and Platonists, and wasn’t the treacle tart absolutely first-class. In the midst of all these stimulating verbal fireworks, little Pip, who was sitting thoughtfully on my left, turned to me and said: ‘Do you like the Beatles, Venetia?’

‘They’re a little young for me, Pip, but I liked “Love Me Do”.’

‘I think they’re fab,’ said Pip. ‘Much better than Plato or Aristotle.’

One of the most attractive aspects of life with the Aysgarths was the wide range of the topics discussed. I doubt if my parents and siblings had heard of the Beatles in the spring of ’sixty-three.

Later in the drawing-room I had an interesting talk about politics with Norman but Cynthia became jealous and winkled him away from me. By this time the Dean had shut himself in his study for his post-prandial snooze, but Eddie Hoffenberg was still hovering as if eager to tell me about his osteopath, so I slipped away to take refuge in Primrose’s flat. Primrose herself had departed after lunch with her boyfriend Maurice Tait, one of the vicars-choral who sang tenor in the Cathedral choir and taught at the Choir School. In fact she cared little for Tait (a damp, limp individual whose hobbies were stamp-collecting and supporting the Bible Reading Fellowship) but she liked to keep him around so that she could talk about ‘my boyfriend’ and look worldly. I didn’t despise her for this. I wouldn’t have minded a neutral escort myself, if only to silence the fiends who muttered: ‘Poor old Venetia!’ behind my back, but no limp, damp individual had presented himself for acquisition. I didn’t count Eddie, of course. Not only was his Wagnerian gloom intolerable but he was so ugly that if I had accepted him as an escort the fiends would merely have gone on muttering: ‘Poor old Venetia!’

I also had to face the fact – an unpalatable one for my ego – that Eddie had never actually tried to do more than trap me in corners and talk about his health. He had never invited me to his house on my own or suggested a visit to the cinema – or even invited me for a walk on a Sunday afternoon. Tait always took Primrose for a walk down by the water-meadows after he had lunched with his mother. Primrose would sigh beforehand and say what a bore these walks were, but I suspected that if Tait had failed to appear one Sunday she would have been very cross indeed.

The rest of the day passed most agreeably, providing a tantalising glimpse of what fun life could be when one was accepted by a group of congenial people; at least at the Aysgarths’ house I was never left out in the cold. After tea we all played croquet and I beat everyone except Boodle. There was much laughter as we languished on the lawn. Then having completed my odyssey among the croquet hoops I ate baked beans on toast with Primrose in her flat and we discussed Life, a ritual which involved reviewing the day’s events, pulling everyone to pieces, putting a few favoured individuals together again and tossing the rest on the scrap-heap. This was fun. Primrose had her faults (priggishness, intolerance, intellectual snobbishness) but she was witty and seldom bored me. I only became bored when she was either talking soppily about her father or droning drearily about her work at the diocesan office on Eternity Street. Every time she began a sentence with the words The Archdeacon and F, my teeth automatically gritted themselves, so when at ten o’clock that evening the dread words tripped off her tongue I waited until she had finished her sentence and then immediately asked if I could have a bath. Half an hour later I was stretched out on the Put-U-Up sofa, now transformed into a bed, and tuning into Radio Luxemburg on my transistor.

‘Good heavens, Vinnie!’ exclaimed Primrose, appearing crossly in curlers as I was smoking a final cigarette and wriggling my toes in time to Elvis Presley. ‘You’re not still listening to that drivel, are you? I can’t understand why you’re so keen on pop music!’

‘No, you wouldn’t. You’re not fundamentally interested in sex.’

‘Honestly, Venetia! What a thing to say!’ She flounced back to her bedroom.

Elvis quivered on vibrantly. As I stubbed out my cigarette I wondered – not for the first time – if anyone would ever invite me to have sexual intercourse, but it seemed like a forlorn hope. Switching off the transistor I pulled the bed-clothes over my head and allowed myself to shed a single furious tear of despair.

III

Easter was the following weekend. In the interval I loafed, smoked and vegetated, unwilling to think deeply about the future and telling myself I needed a few days of absolute rest in order to recuperate from the horrors of London life. I did toy with the idea of reading Honest to God but the desire to escape from my problems by being intellectually mindless was so strong that I could only reread Primrose’s childhood collection of Chalet School books.

Finally I was roused from my torpor by the spectacle of Easter in a great cathedral. I avoided the Good Friday services but attended matins on Sunday morning and was rewarded when Aysgarth preached a most interesting sermon about how Christianity was all set to undergo a dynamic resurrection, recast and restated for the modern age. The Bishop, who was ensconced in his cathedra at one end of the choir, spent much time gazing up at the east window as if he were wondering how it could possibly be cleaned.

The next day Aysgarth was obliged to supervise the conclusion of the special services, but on Tuesday he was free to depart for the Hebrides; he and Eddie planned to drive to Heathrow airport and leave the car in the long-term car-park. At half-past eight that morning after Primrose had departed for her office I wandered across the courtyard of the stables to say goodbye to him, but no sooner had I entered the house by the side-door than I heard Dido’s voice, throbbing with emotion, in the hall. Automatically I stopped dead. I was still well out of sight beyond the stairs.

‘… I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I absolutely swore I wouldn’t break down like this, but I do so wish you were coming to Leicestershire – I know horses bore you, but you could read quietly in the library and –’

‘Darling –’

‘– and at least you’d be there. I just think it’s so sad for Elizabeth and Pip that we’re never together on our own as a family –’

‘But that’s not true!’

‘Not on our own, Stephen – there’s always someone from your first marriage there – all right, we won’t talk of Primrose, but it just seems so wrong that we’re not going to be together –’

‘But when Lord Starmouth offered me the lodge the first thing I did was ask you to come with me!’

‘How could I when I’m ill every time I try to go in a plane?’

‘I was quite prepared to go overland, but since you were adamant that nothing would induce you to go to the Hebrides –’

‘I thought you’d back down and come to Leicestershire. I never dreamed you’d run off instead with Primrose and Eddie and – my God! – Venetia –’

‘What’s wrong with Venetia? Isn’t she Primrose’s best friend and the daughter of one of my own oldest friends?’

‘I don’t give a damn who she is, that girl’s sly, not to be trusted, a trouble-maker –’

‘My dearest, I really don’t think this conversation does you justice –’

‘Oh, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, it’s just that I feel so depressed, so alone, so utterly abandoned –’

There was a silence. I guessed he had been driven to silence her with an embrace. Pressing my back against the wall of the passage I held my breath and waited until at last she said tearfully: ‘How I hate separations!’

‘I’ll write every day.’

‘If only there was a phone at this stupid place –’

‘I’ll try and phone from the nearest village.’

‘Promise?’

‘Of course I promise.’

‘Oh Stephen …’ Another silence elapsed before Aysgarth said abruptly: ‘Here’s Eddie with the car. Quick, take my handkerchief and dry your eyes – where are the children?’

‘I don’t know … Elizabeth! Pip! Your father’s leaving!’

At once I slipped silently away.

IV

Primrose and I began our journey north twenty-four hours later after the day-long diocesan conference of the Young Christians for Peace, an event which Primrose had helped to organise and which apparently could not take place without her. Primrose had always been an enthusiastic organiser. She had acquired the taste for power when she had become a Girl Guide leader, and since then the local branches of the Student Christian Movement, the Bible Reading Fellowship, the Missions to Africa Fund and the Inter-Faith League had all benefited from her efficient interference.

‘You really ought to get interested in some worthwhile cause, Venetia!’ she exclaimed as she returned, flushed with triumph, from her conference. ‘If I were to do nothing but read dated schoolgirl books, watch television and listen to Radio Lux., I’d go mad in no time!’

I refrained from argument; I was all for a quiet life, and since I was a guest in her flat I had a moral obligation to be docile, but I realised then that Mrs Ashworth had been correct in deducing that Primrose and I had reached the parting of the ways.

Meanwhile we had to go on holiday together. Driving to Heathrow in my MG we caught a late-morning flight to Glasgow and arrived in the town of Stornoway, the capital of the Outer Hebrides, in the middle of the afternoon. Although it was the largest settlement on the island of Lewis and Harris, the town was small and the airport was primitive. On stepping out of the little plane I felt a soft damp wind on my cheek. A vast vista of white clouds and green treeless wastes stretched before me, but when I had an immediate impression not of desolation but of peace I realised my mood of torpor was at last beginning to dissolve.

‘There’s Eddie,’ said Primrose.

Eddie’s ungainly figure was clad in the English holiday uniform of grey trousers, a casual shirt and a tweed jacket, but he still managed to look like a foreigner; the uniform was much too well-tailored. He was driving a hired car, a faded white Morris which had seen better days but which bucketed along the narrow roads with surprising spirit. Lewis, I realised as I stared out of the window later at Harris, was the tame, domesticated part of the island. Harris was all bare hills and sinister peat-bogs and glowering little lakes with hardly a croft in sight. Yet I was intrigued. It seemed light years away from London, and beyond the village of Tarbert we appeared to leave civilisation behind completely. A single-track road adorned with the occasional hardy weed wound through brutal hills. Now and then the sea was visible as a lurid strip of midnight blue. Squalls of rain swooped down from the hills and swept away along the coast. Rainbows appeared fleetingly during improbable bursts of sunshine. The car groaned but battled on. I began to be excited.

‘Is there really anything at the end of this road, Eddie?’

‘Wait and see!’ He pulled the car round a hairpin bend, and a second later Primrose and I were both exclaiming in wonder. Before us lay a small bay, shaped like a crescent moon and fringed with pale sand. Overlooking this idyllic seascape stood an Edwardian house, not too big but solid and well-proportioned. Beyond a walled garden the brown-green moors, dotted with rocks, rose towards mountains capped by cloud.

‘Just like Wuthering Heights!’ remarked Primrose. True romantic isolation! All we need now is Heathcliff.’

The front door opened as if on cue, and the Dean of Starbridge stepped out into the porch to welcome us.

V

Despite its remoteness the house turned out to be very comfortable, in that plain tasteful style that always costs a lot of money, and this comfort was enhanced by a married couple who did all the boring things such as cooking, shopping, cleaning and keeping the peat fires burning. At that time of the year in the far north the weather was still cold, particularly in the evenings, but having spent so much of my life at Flaxton Hall, where the heating was either non-existent or modest, I took the chill in my stride. In contrast, wretched Eddie was soon complaining of rheumatic twinges and saying that whenever he was in pain he was convinced he was going to die young.

‘In that case,’ said Primrose, ‘please do die now and save us from listening to any more of your moans,’ but at that point Aysgarth intervened, reminding Eddie lightly that life had been much worse in the POW camp on Starbury Plain and begging Primrose not to encourage anyone to die because it would be so annoying to have to cut short the holiday.

Our days in the wilderness began with breakfast at nine. Eddie then walked to the village and collected the specially ordered copy of The Times; on his return he studied it for twenty minutes. Another brisk trot followed, this time up and down the beach, but finally he allowed himself to relax in the morning-room with The Brothers Karamazov.

In contrast Aysgarth followed quite a different pattern of activity. After breakfast he sat in the drawing-room for a while and gazed at the sea. Then he dipped into one of his newly-purchased paperbacks (all detective stories) and read a few pages. More sea-gazing followed but at last he roused himself sufficiently to pen a letter to his wife. (‘The daily chore,’ commented Primrose to me once in a grim aside.) By the time the letter was finished Eddie had returned from the village but Aysgarth refused to read the newspaper in detail after Eddie had discarded it; he merely glanced at the headlines and tried to do the crossword. Despite his intellect he was very bad at crosswords, almost as bad as he was at bridge, and had to be helped by Primrose and me. The completion of the puzzle took at least twice as long as it should have done because we all spent so much time laughing, but once the last letter had been pencilled in Aysgarth invariably announced with regret: ‘I suppose I ought to take some exercise.’ He then staggered outside, inhaled deeply a few times and staggered back indoors again. As soon as the clock in the hall chimed twelve he declared it was time for drinks. Eddie, who preferred to abstain from alcohol till the evening, remained in the morning-room with The Brothers Karamazov but Aysgarth and I would swill champagne while Primrose toyed with her customary glass of dry sherry.

At some time during the morning Primrose and I would have been out, either scrambling along the rocky coast or following the path up into the stark wild hills. It rained regularly, but since we always wore macks and sou’westers the weather was never a serious inconvenience. Besides, the rain never lasted long. When the sun did shine we continually marvelled at the colours around us: the sea was a sapphire blue, the waves bright white, the sands dark cream, the moors green-brown mixed with ash-grey rock. Primrose took numerous photographs while I tried to impress the scenes on my memory and wished I could paint. Often as we scrambled along the low cliffs we saw seals playing near the beach, and several times in the hills we glimpsed deer. There were never any people. As the days passed my sense of peace increased until I even began to wish I could have been one of those ancient Celtic saints, dedicated to a solitary life in a remote and beautiful place in order to worship God. At least I would have been spared the rat-race in London and the hell of attending the Great Party of Life as a wallflower.

After lunch every day Aysgarth retired for ‘forty winks’, which usually lasted half an hour, Primrose and I read The Times and Eddie wrote letters. Then at three o’clock we departed with a picnic tea for an outing in the car. All over the long island we rambled; on two consecutive days we stopped on the road to Leverburgh at a point above the vast sands which stretched across the bay towards the distant range of blue mountains, and twice we visited the remote church at Rodel on the southernmost tip of Harris. Then I, who was so very bad at worship and so very reluctant to be ‘churchy’, found myself thinking of Jesus Christ, living thousands of miles away in another culture in another millennium, writing nothing, completing his life’s work in three years, a failure by worldly standards, dying an ignoble death – yet still alive in the little church at Rodel on the remotest edge of Europe, still alive for his millions upon millions of followers worldwide, not a despised, rejected failure any more but acknowledged even by non-Christians as one of the greatest men who had ever lived, etched deep on the consciousness of humanity and expressing his mysterious message of regeneration in that most enigmatic of all symbols, the cross.

‘What are you thinking about, Venetia?’ said that pest Eddie, ruining my rare moment of feeling religious as I stood staring at the church.

‘Elvis Presley,’ I said to shut him up. Eddie loathed pop music.

By then I was missing my daily dose of the pops on Radio Luxemburg which seemed to be unobtainable in the Hebrides; perhaps the weather conditions were unfavourable – or perhaps Luxemburg was merely too far away. The BBC in those days devoted little time to musical trivia so my deprivation was severe, but on the other hand there was little time to tune into the wireless. When we returned from our picnic the moment had arrived for a gin-and-tonic for me, whisky for the men and another glass of sherry for Primrose. During dinner we sampled a claret or a white burgundy – or possibly, depending on the menu, both; Aysgarth was taking seriously his absent host’s invitation that we should help ourselves to his well-stocked cellar. After dinner we played bridge or, if we were feeling frivolous, vingt-et-un. Conversation, spiked by all the drink, sparkled. Even Eddie shuddered with mirth occasionally.

‘Father,’ said Primrose late one evening after Eddie had scooped the pool of matchsticks at vingt-et-un and Aysgarth had suggested a nightcap of brandy, ‘isn’t this holiday turning into a distinctly Bacchanalian orgy?’

‘I hope so!’ said Aysgarth amused.

‘So do I!’ I said at once. ‘Primrose, these poor clergymen spend months on end being saintly and strait-laced – why on earth shouldn’t they let their hair down on holiday?’

That idiotic Eddie was unable to resist sighing: ‘“Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die.”’

‘Well, I’m not dying yet!’ declared Aysgarth robustly. ‘I’ve still got a lot of living to do!’

A chord twanged in my memory. ‘“I’ve gotta – whole lotta living to do!”’ I sang, imitating Presley. ‘“Whole lotta loving to do – and there’s-uh no one-uh who I’d rather do it-uh with-uh than you – COME ON, BABY!”’

‘Venetia!’ exclaimed Eddie, appalled by the vulgarity, his eyes almost popping out of his head.

‘Venetia!’ cried Primrose scandalised, casting an embarrassed glance at her father.

‘What a splendid song!’ said my Mr Dean naughtily, unable to resist the urge to shock them still further. ‘Does it come from the repertoire of those young men Pip likes so much?’