Scandalous Risks (8 page)

IV

The South Canonry, where the Ashworths lived, was an early Georgian house far smaller than the old episcopal palace but still too large for a modestly-paid executive with a wife and two adult sons. The garden consisted almost entirely of laboursaving lawns; full-time gardeners were no longer an episcopal perk, and the Ashworths were aided only by a man who came once a week to civilise the lawns with a motor-mower. Mrs Ashworth hated gardening and kept no plants in the house. I always found the bare, uncluttered look in her home immensely appealing.

As I was almost the same age as Charley I had been invited to the house occasionally in the past along with various Aysgarths and other young people in the diocese, but the visits had been infrequent and I had never come to know the Ashworths well. Neither had my parents. My father respected the Bishop’s intellect but found Ashworth was fundamentally unsympathetic to his sentimental, old-fashioned brand of humanism. Whereas Aysgarth was tolerant of agnostics Ashworth seemed hard put to conceal his opinion that agnosticism was an intellectual defect – and there were other differences too, as we all discovered over the years, between the Bishop and the Dean. Aysgarth was gregarious with an apparently inexhaustible supply of good humour, whereas Ashworth, behind his cast-iron charm, was a very private, very serious man. Laymen like my father dubbed Ashworth ‘churchy’ – that sinister pejorative adjective so dreaded by clerics – but Aysgarth was unhesitatingly labelled ‘one of us’. Ashworth, isolated to some degree by the eminence of his office, was held to resemble Kipling’s cat who walked by himself; his close friends had been left behind in Cambridge in1957, and perhaps this was one of the reasons why he was so close to his wife. It was widely observed how well attuned they were to each other. They seemed to generate that special harmony which one finds more often among childless couples, the harmony of two people who find each other entirely sufficient for their emotional needs.

Considering that the marriage was successful, people found it immensely interesting that the two sons should have undergone such obvious problems: Charley had run away from home when he was eighteen while later Michael had been thrown out of medical school. However, these embarrassing episodes now belonged to the past. Charley had been rescued, sorted out and replaced on the rails of conformity, while Michael had been steered into the employment of the BBC with happy results. Why Charley should have run away from home no one had any idea, but Michael’s hedonistic behaviour was universally attributed to a desire to rebel against his father’s puritanical views on sin.

‘There’s a screw loose in that family somewhere,’ Dido would say darkly, ‘you mark my words.’

The irony of this statement was that Aysgarth had the biggest possible screw loose in his family – Dido herself – yet all his children were turning out wonderfully well. This fact must have been very galling to the Ashworths as they struggled to surmount their problems at the South Canonry.

When I arrived at the house that afternoon I was immediately soothed by its well-oiled serenity. The drawing-room was notably dust-free and arranged with a tidiness which was meticulous but not oppressive. A superb tea was waiting to be served. The telephone rang regularly but was silenced almost at once by the Bishop’s secretary in her lair by the front door. Dr Ashworth himself was out, fulfilling an official engagement, but if he had been present he too would have been running smoothly,. just like the house. I could remember him appearing during my past visits and saying to his wife: ‘What did I do with that memo on the World Council of Churches?’ or: ‘Whatever happened to that letter from the Archbishop?’ or: ‘What on earth’s the name of that clergyman at Butterwood All Saints?’ and Mrs Ashworth, indestructibly composed, would always know all the answers.

After tea Charley went upstairs to unpack, Nick wandered outside to tune into the right nature-vibes – or whatever psychics do in gardens – and Mrs Ashworth took me upstairs to her private sitting-room. Unlike my mother’s boudoir at Flaxton Hall there were no dreary antiques, no ghastly oil-paintings of long-dead ancestors, no boring photographs of babies and no vegetation in sight. The air smelt celestially pure. On the walls hung some black-and-white prints of Cambridge and a watercolour of the Norfolk Broads. The only framed photograph on the chimney-piece showed her husband
as an army
chaplain during the war.

‘Sit down,’ said Mrs Ashworth, closing the door. ‘Now that we’ve got rid of the men we can relax. Cigarette?’

‘I do like this room,’ I said, accepting the cigarette and sinking into a comfortable armchair. ‘It’s all you, isn’t it? Everything’s your choice. All my life I’ve had to put up with revolting inherited furniture and now r
^y
e finally reached the point where I’m determined to have a place of my own.’

‘Splendid! All young people need to express themselves through their surroundings. You should have seen Michael’s room when he went through his Brigitte Bardot phase!’

‘I bet Charley puts up all the right pictures,’ I said, not daring to ask what the Bishop had thought of the Bardot pin-ups.

‘Fortunately Charley only has space on his walls for books. My former employer Bishop Jardine left Charley his entire theological library – no doubt because Charley always said he wanted to be a clergyman when he grew up ... But let’s get back to you. So you’re seeking a room of your own! But why seek it in Starbridge?’

‘I’m not sure that I will – I’ve only drifted down here because I’ve got a standing invitation to use the Put-U-Up sofa in Primrose’s flat. I’m such a drifter, Mrs Ashworth! I despise myself for drifting but I don’t seem able to stop. It’s as if I’m marking time, waiting for my life to begin, but nothing ever happens.’

‘When will you consider that your life’s begun? At the altar?’ I was grateful for her swift grasp of my dilemma. ‘Well, I know marriage shouldn’t be the be-all and end-all of a woman’s life, but –’

‘It certainly was before the war. Perhaps this is a case where "the more things change the more they remain the same".’

‘I think it must be. As I see it, I really do have to get married in order to live the kind of life I’d enjoy, but here I am, almost twenty-six, and I’m beginning to think: supposing I never marry, never win respect and status, never stop drifting – I could wind up wasting my entire life.’

‘A nightmarish prospect.’

‘Terrifying. And then I start to feel desperate –
desperate,
Mrs Ashworth, I can’t tell you how desperate I feel sometimes – and now Pm convinced I’ve got to act, got to get out of this rut –’

‘Well, it sounds to me as if you’re making progress at last! You’re looking for a place where you can express your real self; you’ve embarked on an odyssey of self-discovery ... Do you have to worry about money?’

‘No, I’ve got a hefty income because I came into money from both my godmothers when I was twenty-one. Maybe that’s part of the problem? If I were penniless –’

‘– you’d hate it. I did. Now let’s consider your situation carefully –’

‘I don’t have a situation, Mrs Ashworth, I just have a non-event.’ The words suddenly began to stream out of my mouth. ‘I want to live – I mean
live –
I want to swill gin and chat about philosophy with a gang of brilliant people and smooch with handsome men and dance till dawn and burn the candle at both ends, but all I get are boring nine-to-five jobs, social events where I’m an embarrassing failure, no love-life and evenings spent swilling gin on my own while listening to Radio Luxemburg. I’ve never had a boyfriend. I did belong to a gang of clever people but they were all girls. Here I am, bursting to join in the Great Party of Life yet confined to the margins by my utter lack of sex appeal, and it’s awful, Mrs Ashworth, absolutely
awful,
so utterly vile and unfair —’

‘But anyone,’ said Mrs Ashworth, ‘can have sex appeal. It’s simply an attitude of mind.’

I stared at her. She gave me a sphinx-like smile. Enrapt I tried to speak but failed.

‘It’s all a question of confidence,’ said my heroine, flicking ash from her cigarette casually into the nearby tray, ‘and in your case it would be confidence in your appearance. You want to be able to walk into a room and think: I’m glamour personified — how lucky all those men are to see me!’

‘But I’m not beautiful!’

‘Neither was Cleopatra.’

‘Yes, but she was Queen of Egypt —’

‘— and she made the most of it. That’s what you have to do too — make the most of your assets. Stand up for a moment.’ I stood up.

‘Revolve.’

I revolved.

‘Yes,’ said Mrs Ashworth tranquilly, waving her cigarette to indicate I could sit down again, ‘it’s all very simple. Wear plain, tailored clothes which emphasise your waist and hips. Never wear flat shoes even though you happen to be tallish. Favour V-necks to distract the masculine eye from your shoulders and take care not to stoop — that only makes the shoulders more noticeable. And grow your hair.’

‘Grow it? But Mrs Ashworth, I’ll turn into a sort of yak!’

‘Nonsense, men adore the Pre-Raphaelite look. Oh, and go to a beauty salon and get advice on make-up. You have the most beautiful eyes. Make them a focal point.’

‘But do you really think that if I do all this —’

‘That’s just the beginning. Then you must plot how to get in with a crowd of clever, interesting people by exploiting a clever, interesting person who’s already known to you. How about Christian Aysgarth? You can’t be much younger than his wife.’

‘Well, yes, I do know Christian and Katie, hut —’

‘Splendid! They’re your passport to your new life. Don’t linger in dull old Starbridge. Seek that room you want in Oxford and wangle your way into Christian’s set.’

‘But Christian just sees me as one of Primrose’s gang of virgin spinsters!’

‘He won’t when you arrive in Oxford flaunting glamorous eye make-up and Pre-Raphaelite hair. I think that you and Primrose,’ said Mrs Ashworth, careful in her choice of words, ‘may have reached the parting of the ways.’ Before I could comment she was adding with regret: ‘I wish I could invite you to stay tonight, but thanks to Nicholas and our visiting American bishop, we’ve got a full house.’

I said with curiosity: ‘What’s Nick’s connection with your family?’

‘His father and Charles have known each other for many years, and since Jon Darrow’s now very old Charles likes to keep a paternal eye on Nicholas to make sure he’s all right.’

‘Isn’t there a mother?’

‘She died. There’s a half-brother in London —’

‘The actor.’

‘That’s right — and there was a half-sister, but she’s dead now too and Nicholas never had much in common with her children.’

‘He’s very ...’ I tried to find the right word but could only produce a banality ‘... unusual’

‘Yes, isn’t he? Sometimes I think he needs a substitute mother, but I never feel my maternal instinct can stretch far enough to take him on — although I must say, my maternal instinct seems to have stretched out of sight during this conversation! I seem to have forgotten I’m a bishop’s wife. Instead of advising you to vamp the intellectuals of Oxford I should be telling you to get a job at the diocesan office and help me with my charity work in your spare time!’

I laughed but before I could reply the front door banged far away in the hall. ‘That’ll be either Charles or our American bishop,’ said Mrs Ashworth, rising to her feet, ‘and let’s hope it’s Charles. I do like Americans, but all that sunny-natured purring’s so exhausting.’

‘Darling!’ shouted the Bishop downstairs.

‘Coo-ee !’ called Mrs Ashworth with relief, and added indulgently to me: ‘Isn’t he funny? He so often arrives home and shouts: "Darling!" like that. It’s as if he has no idea what to do next and is waiting for instructions.’

In walked the Bishop, looking like a film star in a costume melodrama. The old episcopal uniform of apron, gaiters and frock-coat, so suitable for the eighteenth-century bishops who had had to ride around their dioceses on horseback, was finally giving way to more modem attire, but for his official engagement that afternoon Dr Ashworth had decided to be conservative, and he looked well in his swashbuckling uniform. He was two years older than Aysgarth, but like his wife he appeared younger – not much younger, perhaps, but he could still have passed for a man on the right side of sixty.

‘How are your parents?’ he said to me agreeably after the greetings had been exchanged.

‘Seething. I’ve just left home and embarked on a new life.’

He gave me his charming smile but it failed to reach the corners of his eyes. Perhaps he was trying to decide whether I could be classified as ‘wayward’ or ‘lost’ or even ‘fallen’. Smoothly he fell back on his erudition. ‘This sounds like a case of
metanoia!
’
he remarked. ‘By which I mean –’

‘I know what it means. The Dean told me. It’s a turning away from one’s old life and the beginning of a new one.’

‘In Christ,’ said the Bishop casually, as if correcting an undergraduate who had made an error in a tutorial. ‘I hope the Dean didn’t forget to mention Christ, but these liberal-radicals nowadays seem to be capable of anything.’ He turned to his wife and added: ‘I lost count of the times I was asked about
Honest to God
this afternoon. People were deeply upset. It’s a pity Robinson wasn’t there to see the results of his ill-informed, half-baked radicalism.’

‘I thought Robinson was supposed to be a conservative,’ I said. ‘After all, he wasn’t invited to contribute to
Soundings,
was he?’

The Bishop looked startled. ‘Who’s been talking to you of
Soundings?
’

‘
The Dean was very enthusiastic when the book was published.’

‘I’d have more confidence in Stephen’s bold espousal of the views contained in these controversial books if I knew he was a trained theologian,’ said Dr Ashworth. ‘However, as we all know, he read Greats, not Theology, when he was up at Oxford.’

‘But since he’s been a clergyman for almost forty years,’ I said, ‘don’t you think he might have picked up a little theology somewhere along the way?’