Glittering Images (63 page)

‘I’d much rather think of you. Do you take sugar in your tea?’

‘Now
that’s
reality! No, thanks. Just milk.’

I poured out the tea. ‘So far,’ I said, ‘I still can’t see any heroes or villains in this story, only victims.’

‘Victims of God?’ she said. ‘Or victims of the Devil?’ And she added unexpectedly, ‘That’s a charism, isn’t it – the ability to distinguish the manifestation of God from the manifestation of the Devil in ambiguous circumstances. Alex told me it’s called the charism of the discernment of spirits.’

We were silent for a moment, but then I said, ‘Ring up the curtain on the next act and let me test my powers of discernment.’

‘Personally I incline to think that wherever a situation emerges in which the cohabitation of the husband and wife cannot reasonably or equitably be required, there a prima facie case for divorce must be held to exist.’

‘Before one could rightly order these folk to go apart, we must be well assured that they are not in spiritual fact
married.
In the region of essential morals we cannot stake everything on the presence or absence of the legal certificate.’

More Letters of Herbert Hensley Henson
Bishop of Durham 1920–1939
ed.
E. F. BRALEY
.

‘For a long time,’ said Lyle, sipping her tea, ‘everything was fine. Or perhaps I should say it was fine despite the peculiar circumstances which in fact made everything very difficult indeed. The first major problem was secrecy; I moved my bedroom to that remote nook in the south turret, but Alex thought it might look odd if he changed his bedroom arrangements at the same time, so he and Carrie continued with their shared room although now he always slept in the dressing-room. Then later they got twin beds so that they could occasionally sleep within the same four walls and present a façade of marital intimacy to the servants.

‘The danger to our secrecy in fact came from another quarter altogether. Alex and I had had five years’ experience of suppressing our feelings for each other, but it wasn’t so easy to maintain a bland façade once we were also indulging in great intimacy – it was the switching backwards and forwards which was so tricky. We developed a strict rule that we should never under any circumstances embrace except in my room – and that was tough because we longed to snatch a kiss sometimes, but it just wasn’t worth the risk. We also developed the golden rule that we were never to neglect Carrie – in fact Carrie was quite a problem to us at first because we felt guilty about her; we couldn’t help feeling guilty even though we both knew she’d consented to the divorce of her own free will. Carrie was also a problem in another way, poor darling – both Alex and I were terrified she’d be indiscreet. I watched her like a hawk in the early months, but in fact Carrie never once let us down – she was so very conscious how vital it was that she should never make a mistake.

‘The other major difficulty at first was the sex. This may surprise you – I expect you imagined us plunging away happily for hours, but we were both paralytic with fear in case I started a baby and for a long while after that first night we didn’t go the whole hog at all. The advantage of that was that I was able to get used to intimacy without being overpowered by it, but eventually I went up to town, to the Marie Stopes Clinic, pretended to be a legally married woman and got myself a Dutch cap. After that everything was fine, but the sex always had its slightly sordid side – the hole-in-the-corner side of the clandestine love affair. For instance we both used to worry about the sheets so finally we always lay on a shawl which I could wash myself … Oh heavens, Charles, forgive me for dragging in these details but I want to be truthful, I want you to see the absolute grinding
reality
of it all –’

‘It’s much better that you should be entirely frank. Tell me, did Jardine never get caught going to your room? I’d have worried about that if I’d been him.’

‘Well, he seldom came at night. He reckoned that people always suspect the worst if a man goes creeping around the corridors at night in his dressing-gown but no one bats an eyelid if a man wanders casually around fully dressed in broad daylight. Usually Alex would visit me in the early morning, around six. The room next to mine had been converted into a bathroom so I never had to worry about a maid arriving with hot water in the mornings, and in the winter I lit the fire myself to “spare the servants” – that went down well in the servants’ hall – so in fact no housemaid ever came near my room until my bed was made between nine and ten. Early mornings were always the best time – or we’d meet sometimes in the early evening when everyone was changing for dinner … But when we met it was always as lovers, never as husband and wife. At the beginning that was all very exciting, but later I began to long for a whole night with him, like a real wife. However he always said that was impossible; some wretched vicar might blow his brains out or the Cathedral might burn down – and then there’d be hell to pay if the Bishop wasn’t found sleeping in the right bed.

‘I expect you can guess where all this is leading, can’t you? I became discontented. The discontent came on gradually, so gradually that for a long time I wasn’t aware of it – but the more successful I became as Alex’s unofficial wife the more ardently I longed to be “Mrs Bishop” in the eyes of the world; it was as if our situation had had the seeds of its own destruction built into it from the beginning.

‘The discontent affected my spiritual life – I expect that as a clergyman you were wondering about that. Well, I was fine after the marriage; Alex had told me that there was absolutely no possibility that we were committing adultery and so of course I believed him. Why not? Damn it, he
was
the Bishop! So I had no pangs of conscience on that score and turned up at Communion every week, but when I became unhappy … and the good fortune began to go sour … it wasn’t so easy. I began to wonder dimly if I was being punished … But I didn’t like to talk about my uncertainty to Alex – not just because I was ashamed of doubting him but because Alex, if the truth be told, isn’t a born counsellor. He’s sympathetic and he’s not incapable of intuitive understanding, but he finds it hard to resist the temptation to make a brilliant speech which solves the problem by temporarily converting one to his point of view. I knew that if I raised any doubts Alex would efficiently talk me out of them, but I didn’t want someone to talk; I wanted someone to listen, and there was absolutely no one I could turn to.

‘Then a very odd thing happened. As I’ve already said, I’d never been maternal but one day when I was out in the town I saw this baby in a pram and suddenly I thought: if I was a real wife I’d have one of those. And immediately I pictured this adorable little boy with golden eyes saying, “Mummy! Mummy!” and holding out his arms to be loved. Can you believe it? I couldn’t – not at first. I thought: how could I be so hopelessly sentimental? But then I saw that the baby symbolized all the important things of life which I’d longed for yet never managed to get. It wasn’t just a case of being overwhelmed by the maternal instinct, although I think the urge to have a baby becomes more powerful as a childless woman grows older and realizes her time is running out – indeed I now suspect my early antipathy to motherhood began to be eroded by the maternal drive as soon as I entered my thirties. But I didn’t think of that when I saw the baby in his pram. All I knew at that moment was that I was face to face again with the deprivation I had endured all my life. I’d been deprived of my father, deprived of any sort of normal existence in a family, deprived of a
real
husband – and now when I saw I was once more being cheated of love, a baby’s love, a simple
uncomplicated
love devoid of lies and deceit, the kind of love most women take for granted – well, I couldn’t bear it. I felt as if I were the kitten drowning in the rain-barrel all over again.

‘I turned to Alex for comfort but he was useless – he just got upset. He said, “Do you think I don’t want your child more than anything else in the world?” but that sort of emotional statement was no help to me at all; it only made me feel worse than ever, and finally we had a row. That upset Carrie. She always knew if anything was wrong between us. One day I found her crying. She wouldn’t tell me at first what the matter was but eventually she said: “I expect you’re wishing I was dead so that you could marry him properly.” I felt dreadful then, absolutely annihilated. I flung my arms around her and said no, no, never, never … But of course I often did wonder how long she was going to go on.

‘Can you see how ghastly this situation was becoming? I felt as if someone – God or the Devil – had taken a giant spoon and was slowly stirring us up. I began to feel so muddled, muddled about Carrie, muddled about Alex, muddled about the marriage … Finally I went off sex. Alex hated that – and not just for purely selfish reasons but because he thought, poor Alex, that there was so little he could really give me that the least he could do was satisfy me in bed. It took me a while to realize that, but once I understood – oh, I felt so guilty, so unhappy that
he
was unhappy, and of course I let him talk me back into bed in the end. It was then – when he seduced me back – that he … No, I can’t put it into words. Some things really are too bizarre to be talked about. But he made sure the sex was better than ever.

‘Yet can you see how the triangle was coming apart at the seams? We all loved one another, but we were none of us happy any more. By this time – it was last May – what I couldn’t bear was seeing Carrie play Mrs Jardine in public – opening fêtes, presiding at charity committee meetings, getting all the attention from the important clerics and their wives at the big services … It was intolerable. I could feel myself becoming angrier and angrier, more and more bitter –
I
did all the hard work,
I
kept him happy in bed,
I
was the one he loved – and yet I was no one, just the ageing spinster who was rumoured to cherish a pathetic secret passion for the Bishop – oh, I often wanted to scream with rage and frustration, and all my feelings came to a head at the Coronation when Carrie got the wife’s seat in the Abbey. Suddenly something snapped inside me and I poured out all my rage to them both … Then I hated myself because they were so dreadfully upset – and I knew at once not only how much I loved them but how absolutely
bound
I was to them both. It was loving the two of them at once – in such very different ways – which was so enslaving, and the weight of their joint love seemed to pin me in position so that there was no possibility of escape.

‘Well, we patched up the quarrel, but I wouldn’t go with them to London. I sat at home and thought and thought … I was in one of those awful states where one’s thoughts go round and round in circles. Carrie could die tomorrow or she could live another twenty-five years. How much longer could I go on as I was? Was my marriage valid in God’s sight or wasn’t it? I could still tell myself it was but I was certainly beginning to wonder if I were entrapped in some frightful fraud. I was thirty-five years old, time was passing by and was I ever going to get my adorable little boy with the golden eyes or was he going to remain an unborn dream? I nearly went mad, torturing myself with those sort of thoughts, and all the time – all the time – I told myself: I can never leave them.

‘And then … into this terrible situation when God – or the Devil – was really tightening the screws of my emotional rack … Well, you know what happened next, don’t you –’

‘Enter Dr Ashworth,’ I said, ‘on his shining white horse. Can I pour you some more tea?’

‘Well, I thought I was on the rack before you arrived,’ said Lyle as I refilled our cups, ‘but that was nothing – that was just the introduction to the torture-chamber. I took one look at you and thought – much as I’d thought when I’d seen the baby in the pram: I’d like one of those. A handsome, young Canon with a golden future … I could see it all, right down to the new curtains I would order when I was Mrs Bishop at last in an episcopal palace which was really my own.

‘But then the guilt hit me like a hammer and I despised myself. I thought: if I were a real wife I’d never succumb to such wicked dreams. And I felt so unfit, so … oh, so polluted by everything … But I made up my mind to fight the temptation very hard and be a good wife to Alex so that he and Carrie would never know how vile and disloyal my thoughts had been.

‘But you weren’t prepared to make fidelity easy for me, were you? My God, how you frightened me! You frightened us all. One of the worst moments was when I found you’d invaded my bedroom with the rose and the limericks. I kept all my contraceptive paraphernalia locked up in a jewel-box so I knew that was safe, but the tell-tale shawl was just stuffed in a drawer, and if you’d searched my room … the stains … I was practically gibbering with terror.

‘However Alex calmed me down. We had a conference, he, Carrie and I, and he said, “There’s only one way to handle this and that’s to act as if nothing’s wrong. The more hostile we get the more Ashworth is going to think we’ve something to hide.” Then he said to me, “Be as cool to him as you always are with the infatuated chaplains and he’ll soon see he’s wasting his time.”

‘Of course Alex knew you posed a more serious threat than an infatuated chaplain but he did trust me not to be unfaithful, and at that stage you were just a colossal nuisance. However at the same time – and this was
very
bizarre – he seemed to find you fascinating. He talked about you a lot. He was convinced you had serious problems, all to do with women and your father – well, I just thought he was looking at you and seeing his own reflection; I didn’t take him seriously, and meanwhile I was busy trying to convince myself that you were merely a dashing Doctor of Divinity who fancied himself with the ladies. However after that lovely evening at the Staro Arms I found it was impossible to remain cool and detached. That kiss outside the Cathedral … God knows how I didn’t pass out. I wanted to leap into bed with you and make love till dawn.