Scandalous Risks (15 page)

III

After feasting my eyes on Aysgarth for half an hour I sped out of the Cathedral before Eddie could waylay me and headed for Primrose’s flat. When I had removed my possessions earlier I had left a note of explanation, but nevertheless I thought I should call to smooth any feathers which might have been ruffled by my defection. On my arrival I found that Primrose had just returned from the diocesan office and was relaxing with the current edition of the
Church Gazette
.

..
so don’t take offence, Prim, because I really do think I’d be an ogre of exploitation if I cluttered up your space a day longer — I simply must give you back your privacy ...’

Touched by such high-minded consideration, Primrose said how understanding I was and we parted good friends. My next task was to work out how I could avoid inviting her to the Orgy. The last person I wanted to see there was Primrose, looking down her nose as I launched myself into my new life as a member of Marina Markhampton’s ‘basic coterie’.

‘Marina,’ I said as soon as I returned to the Chantry, ‘what the hell am I going to do about Primrose? I don’t want to invite her to the Orgy but I don’t see how I can ditch her. We’ve been friends too long.’

‘Has she a boyfriend whom we could coax to whisk her off to a champagne supper on the night in question?’

‘Maurice Tait couldn’t whisk off anything.’

‘Trust Primrose to fancy a non-whisker! But don’t worry, we’ll invite them both and make sure they’re so appalled that they leave early. A basic coterie bash soon separates the wheat from the chaff - which reminds me, talking of the wheat, we must pick the rest of the wild-cards. I’ve chosen Nicky Darrow. Who do you fancy?’

I tried to look as if I were considering vast numbers of eligible males. ‘All the really interesting people are abroad,’ I mused mendaciously. ‘I’ll leave the selecting to you.’

‘Okay, I’ll give Dinkie Kauffman a whirl — she’s an American girl who worked with me at the art gallery. Then I’ll ask Christian to bring an interesting man — oh, and why don’t we ask Michael Ashworth to produce a trendy male from the BBC?’

‘But that means three out of the four wild-cards will be men!’

‘So what? All the more fun for us girls!’

‘Ah yes,’ I said, feeling that my mask of sophistication had slipped. ‘Silly of me.’

‘So much for the guests,’ said Marina, scribbling busily on her notepad. ‘Now perhaps we should consider the really vital matter of drink. What shall we order?’

‘Champagne, naturally,’ I said. ‘How about Veuve Clicquot ‘fifty-five?’

My mask of sophistication was instantly restored. ‘How marvellous!’ said Marina admiringly. ‘You’re a wine expert!’ And I allowed myself a deprecating smile as I modestly examined my fingernails.

We were just trying to calculate the number of bottles which would be required when the telephone rang.

Marina picked up the receiver. ‘The Orgy Planning Office — may I help you?’ she droned in the manner of a secretarial zombie, and then a second later her entire demeanour changed. ‘Christian!’ she exclaimed. ‘So you got my message ...’ And as she talked on, telling him about her plans, it suddenly dawned on me not only that she was in love with him but that the unsupervised stay in a beautiful house, the placing of herself against the ravishing backdrop of the Cathedral, the exact nature of the social event which would inevitably lure him from Oxford — all had been planned long before she had left London. It seemed I had met yet another slave to a one-sided grand passion.

No wonder we had discovered we were soul-mates.

IV

Christian Aysgarth was at that time nearly thirty-six and had been married for six years to the granddaughter of a former Earl of Starmouth, the ninth earl who had so interested himself in the affairs of the Church earlier in the century and whose wife — his second wife, Katie’s grandmother — had prided herself on her collection of distinguished clerical acquaintances; like Marina’s grandmother she had been one of swashbuckling Bishop Jardine’s ‘Lovely Ladies’, happily married aristocratic women who could offer him a devoted platonic friendship in those fabled days before the war when bishops had apparently had no trouble combining a worldly glamour with the indestructible virtue required by their office.

Aysgarth — my Mr Dean — had been Jardine’s protégé. Inevitably he had gravitated into Lady Starmouth’s benevolent orbit, but although Christian could remember being introduced to her during his adolescence, he had not met her granddaughter Katherine until he was twenty-six, down from Oxford with his double first and poised to be a ‘deb’s delight’, one of those eligible young males who were invited to adorn the débutante balls. Christian had been educated at Winchester and Balliol; he appeared every inch the gentleman, but nevertheless Lady Star-mouth could probably never quite forget that his grandfather had been a draper. Katie, of course, only cared that Christian was tall, dark, handsome, brilliant and charming, an extraordinary specimen of masculine perfection, but like the rest of us who yearned for Christian she was obliged to yearn in vain – until he decided that the right wife could be a useful acquisition.

Katie was without doubt the right wife, perfectly equipped to play the heroine in the great romance which his life now demanded. Intelligent but not intellectual, beautiful, rich, well-connected and well-bred, she was acquired in
_1957.
By that time the Starmouths had forgotten the grandfather who had been a draper. Christian had won such distinction up at Oxford that his pedigree had ceased to be important, and besides, his father had just been appointed Dean of Starbridge. The Aysgarths, as my father remarked at the time, had finally arrived.

My description of Christian may seem a trifle barbed but I have no wish to present him as a cardboard cut-out character, all surface and no depth, like the hero of a bad romantic novel. Let me now add that although he often seemed too perfect to be true, he was capable of exercising an unexpectedly cruel wit; he could also be arrogant and selfish. Katie adored him even when he was being monstrous, and I always thought this was a mistake. It might have been better if she had occasionally screamed abuse at him and slapped his face; it could have made the marriage more intriguing. However it was generally agreed that the marriage was a success, and although Christian never seemed much interested in the two little girls it had produced this may have been because he was not a demonstrative man and seemed to be repelled by any display of emotion. (On reflection perhaps Katie was right not to scream abuse at him and slap his face.) Sometimes I wondered if he ever felt nervous because there was so little left for him to achieve. After leaving Winchester, where he had been a scholar, he had completed two suitably heroic years of National Service before going up to Oxford to read Greats. Having won his brilliant first he had then read Theology with equal success, but had afterwards refused to proceed to a theological college to train as a clergyman. No reason was ever given. ‘He just told Father he wasn’t called to serve God in the Church,’ Primrose had told me at the time.

‘But didn’t your father want to know why?’

‘Oh, he could never have asked. Father finds it difficult to talk to his sons – and the boys find it equally difficult to talk to him.’ Primrose had then paused as if searching for the appropriate words before adding obscurely: ‘I’m all right; Father has different standards for girls. I don’t have to win scholarships or "get on" in a first-class career because Father thinks I’m perfect just as I am. But it’s much harder for the boys to be perfect. They live in terror of disappointing him.’

‘But why does he expect you all to be perfect?’ I had said baffled. My father never expected his children to be anything but trouble.

‘He sees us all as prizes – ultimate prizes – prizes awarded him by God – and of course those sort of prizes could never be other than perfect.’

‘But nobody’s perfect, Primrose!’

‘No, but Father’s such an idealist and he loves us all so much so naturally we don’t want to let him down. That’s why the boys always do their best to hide their problems from him; they couldn’t bear him to be upset.’

‘But that means they must all lead a double life – the perfect life on the surface and the imperfect life underneath!’

‘No, the boys all lead a single life; they simply bowdlerise their reports of it to Father. If anyone leads a double life it’s Father himself, living as the dynamic dean and the harassed husband. Probably the only way he can survive that awful woman is to divide himself into two in order to escape from her regularly.’

I was to recall this conversation more than once in 1963, but I first recalled it on that April evening at the Chantry when I realised Marina was in love with Christian; I started to wonder if he too, like his father, was living a divided life. There was no denying his dynamic career at Oxford. Following up the medieval interests which he had acquired during his theological studies he was now coasting along towards the inevitable chair in medieval studies or medieval philosophy – or whatever the crucial professorship was in his rarefied field of endeavour. He had written two acclaimed books, both about the effect of Aristotle’s influence on the medieval Church, and he was now working on a study of Averroes, the Arab philosopher. But how far did this distinguished career satisfy him? And how content was he with his apparently idyllic marriage? I had no idea, but the thought of Marina, hoving to on the horizon like some latter-day Helen of Troy, was vaguely worrying.

I have described Christian at length not merely because he was to be the star guest at the Orgy, but because it would have been obvious to someone more mature than I was then that the Aysgarth family was far more convoluted than was apparent during the jolly Sunday lunches which I occasionally attended at the Deanery. However, contrary to the sophisticated image I was so busily promoting to Marina, my experience of the world was still very limited.

The date of the Orgy depended on the state of Christian’s engagement diary, but a blank space was uncovered beside Saturday, the eighteenth of May, and Christian said it would be a relief to escape briefly from Oxford while the undergraduates, tortured by examinations, were threatening to commit suicide en masse. Marina then spent much time worrying that her chosen guests might have other engagements, but in the end the Coterie proved quite unable to resist the magic combination of the Cathedral Close, Marina Markhampton and countless cases of Veuve Clicquot. In London imaginative excuses were produced to soothe various jilted hostesses. Only Nick Darrow in Cambridge said he was too busy with exams to accept the invitation, but Marina found out by chance from Michael Ashworth that Nick was planning to sneak back to the Starbridge diocese that weekend to see his father; apparently St Darrow was about to celebrate his eighty-third birthday. Immediately Marine badgered Nick with a series of winning little notes until he wrote back and said he might be able to look in on the party for a short time after all.

‘Imagine playing hard to get when one’s only twenty,’ said Marina acidly. ‘He’ll be a terror when he grows up.’

‘Maybe he genuinely doesn’t want to come but doesn’t have the experience to shake you off gracefully.’

‘But
everyone
wants to come to this party!’ protested Marina outraged. ‘Everyone always wants to come to
all
my parties!’

‘Maybe he’s too young to know that.’

I was somewhat perturbed by the guests’ diverse ages, but Marina insisted that mixing age-groups created no problems for the Coterie. ‘Christian always likes to be with younger people,’ she said. ‘He missed so much fun when he was young because he had to study so hard, and now he says he’ll be making up for lost time until he’s at least forty. Anyway, apart from little Nicky, who’s clearly very juvenile, the youngest man present will be Michael Ashworth and since he always carries on like a roué of thirty instead of an innocent of twenty-three, he’ll fit in perfectly. The ages of the unmarried girls don’t count, of course, so long as everyone’s under twenty-eight. I’ve noticed that once unmarried girls get to that fatal age they become so nervous of winding up on the spinsters’ scrap-heap that they set every man’s teeth on edge.’

I absorbed this information in silence as 1 realised that only two years separated me from the scrap-heap, but soon I was able to blot out this nightmare by ordering champagne by the case and arranging for the best firm of caterers in Starbridge to provide a sumptuous buffet supper. I did occasionally spare a thought for that sordid subject, money, but Marina was sublimely confident that her grandmother would foot the bills.

‘Granny told me to have a lovely time while I was here,’ she said, ‘so I may as well take her at her word.’

‘Marina, I rather doubt that when Lady Markhampton made arrangements for you to buy food and drink on tick, she visualised you ordering umpteen cases of champagne.’

‘Well, if she gets cross Daddy can toss her a couple of hundred guineas next Christmas.’

I decided to stop worrying about Lady Markhampton’s potential cardiac arrest and start worrying about what on earth I was going to wear.

In those days one still dressed formally for parties – unless one was a student at some redbrick university or a freak at art school – so although Marina mused on the possibility of wearing nothing but a leopard skin bikini she was quick enough to whip a masterpiece of
haute couture
out of her wardrobe when the discussion became serious. As usual I looked frightful in all my evening dresses. Starbridge, typically provincial, was only good for tweeds and twin sets. Making a quick dash to London I avoided Knightsbridge, where the snooty shop assistants made me feel like one of the Ugly Sisters in
Cinderella,
and waded through that Lethe of plebeian consumerism, Oxford Street. Since no one I knew ever went there except to buy underwear at Marks and Spencer’s, I felt I could sink into a liberating anonymity and forget my inferiority complex.

I was just wandering past Richards – or was it C&A? – and thinking how grim life must be for the ‘lower orders’, obliged through lack of money to buy their clothes in cheap shops, when I saw a greenish-golden slinky creation in the window and knew immediately that I was being offered the opportunity to convert myself into a sex symbol. I sped across the threshold. The little assistant was charming and deferential. (Why
do
the upper classes confine themselves to ghastly, expensive shops? Why don’t we
all
invade Richards and C&A?) The dress, which would have cost some astronomical sum in Bond Street, was mine at the drop of a ten-pound note. Then having saved myself so much money I decided I should celebrate my success by having a little flutter at Fortnum’s. They do roast beef so well in the main restaurant, and a woman can lunch there on her own without being regarded as a freak.

At Waterloo Station I finally bought a copy of
Honest to God
but on the train I fell asleep before I had even reached page two. A half-bottle of Nuits St Georges is probably not the ideal prelude to any serious study of theology.

When I awoke an hour later the guest-list for the Orgy was revolving in my mind, just as it so often did in those days in response to my eager anticipation. At the top of the list stood Christian and Katie, who would be leaving their two little girls behind with the au pair in order to make the lightning trip to Starbridge. Then came our second married couple, Christian’s brother Norman, the barrister who lectured in law at London University, and man-eating Cynthia who had kept Norman from an academic appointment in Oxford by insisting that she was unable to live in the provinces. Their one child was also to be left at home, but unfortunately this always had to happen as there was something wrong with him; he was looked after by a full-time nurse. Whenever I saw Cynthia preening herself before the mirror in an ecstasy of vanity, I always reminded myself that she had a tragedy at the centre of her life and that allowances had to be made for her.

Chief among the unmarried guests was Peregrine Palmer, who had been at Winchester with Christian and who was reputed to have some secret job in the Foreign Office. (The word ‘spy’ was never mentioned but everyone knew he spoke Russian.) Following Perry on the list was Katie’s brother Simon, a handsome slab who was supposed to be ‘something in the City’ – a euphemism which described the paid idleness of various upper-class males who were too brainless to do more than play polo – and after Simon came Robert Welbeck, who had been up at Oxford with Marina’s brother Douglas some years ago and who was now employed by a merchant bank. The ranks of the bachelors were then boosted by Michael Ashworth, the Bishop’s younger son, now learning to be a television producer after his hedonistic romps at medical school.

Next came the two girls who were due to join forces with Marina and me to keep the bachelors amused: Emma-Louise Hanson had become friends with Marina during their débutante days, and Holly Carr had been at school with Marina at Downe House. I don’t think either girl did much. Holly was a cordon bleu cook and occasionally whipped up a chic boardroom lunch. Emma-Louise was supposed to be a secretary but was usually unemployed in order to attend to her social life.

These girls completed the list of the Coterie members. There followed the ‘wild-cards’, chosen to add spice to the party. Dinkie Kauffman, Marina’s American friend from the art gallery, sounded promising; she was reputed to look like Jane Russell and talk like Philip Marlowe. Nick Darrow was too young to be seriously amusing but could nonetheless be relied upon to produce stimulating vibes. Don Latham, Michael’s friend from the BBC, was an unknown quantity but since Michael had enthusiastically described him as ‘outta sight’ one could hope for something original to materialise. Whom Christian intended to bring we had no idea, since he refused to tell
us,
but I was prepared to share Marina’s confidence that this ‘Mr X’ would be fascinating.