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‘The theology of redemption and the theology of the Incarnation.’
‘Impossible!’ said my father again. ‘Two highly intelligent men going berserk over theology—of all subjects! No, no, Aysgarth, I refuse to believe it, you must be romancing!’
‘I assure you I’m not – although to be fair to Ashworth,’ said Aysgarth with an effort, ‘I should explain that at the time he was obviously still suffering from his experiences as a POW.’
Unable to restrain my curiosity I asked: ‘What exactly do you mean when you talk about the theology of redemption and the theology of the Incarnation?’ but my father at once cried imperiously: ‘Stop!’ and held up his hand. ‘I refuse to allow theology to be discussed in my drawing-room,’ he declared. ‘I value my collection of glasses too highly. Now Aysgarth, I’m sure you’re worrying unnecessarily. Ashworth’s not going to bear you a grudge just because you once drove him to behave like a hooligan during some bizarre tiff, and besides, you’re now both such distinguished Christian gentlemen! If you do indeed wind up living in the same cathedral close, then of course you’ll both have no trouble drawing a veil over the past and being civil to each other.’
‘Of course,’ said Aysgarth blandly, but he downed the rest of his scotch as if he still needed to drown his dread.
II
The appointments were eventually announced within a week of each other in The Times. Ashworth did accept the bishopric, although it was whispered on the Athenaeum’s grapevine that he nearly expired with the strain of making up his mind.
‘I think I must now give a little men-only dinner-party for him and Aysgarth at the House of Lords,’ said my father busily to my mother. ‘It might be helpful in breaking the ice if they met again in a plain, simple setting without a crucifix in sight.’
‘Anything less plain and simple than that baroque bastion of privilege would be hard to imagine,’ I said, furious at this new attempt to relegate me to the side-lines, ‘and why do you always want to exclude women from your dinner-parties?’
‘Don’t speak to your father in that tone of voice, please, Venetia,’ said my mother casually without pausing to glance aside from the flowers she was arranging. ‘Ranulph, you needn’t be afraid to hold the dinner-party here; Dido won’t come. When I telephoned yesterday to enquire how she was, her companion said she was still accepting no invitations.’
‘And besides,’ I said, turning over a page of Punch, ‘if you stick to your misogynist principles, you won’t be able to ogle that “nice little wife” of Professor Ashworth’s at the dinner-party.’
‘Nice little wife?’ echoed my mother, sufficiently startled to forget her flower arrangement and face us. ‘Well, I’ve only met her a couple of times at dinner-parties, but I thought she was tough as nails, the sort of chairwoman who would say to her committee: “I’m so glad we’re all in agreement,” and then effortlessly impose her views on the dissenting majority!’
‘For God’s sake let’s have both Ashworths to dinner as soon as possible,’ I said, tossing Punch aside. ‘I can’t wait.’
The dinner took place a fortnight later.
III
My mother invited Primrose to accompany her father to the dinner-party, and she also extended an invitation to Aysgarth’s third son, James, who was stationed with his regiment in London. Any young man in the Guards who can look dashing on horseback in a glamorous uniform will always be popular with mothers of unmarried daughters, but twenty-four-year-old males with the cultural limitations of a mollusc have never struck me as being in the least amusing.
‘I wish you’d invited Christian and Norman as well as James,’ I grumbled, but my mother said she had to avoid swamping the Ashworths with Aysgarths. The Ashworths did have two teenage sons but at the time of the dinner-party Charley was doing his National Service and Michael was away at school.
I regretted being deprived of Christian; like every girl I knew I had gone through a phase of being madly in love with Aysgarth’s eldest son, and although I had by this time recovered from my secret and wholly unreciprocated passion for this masculine phenomenon who looked like a film star and talked like a genius, a secret hankering for him lingered on.
Meanwhile, as I hankered in vain for Christian’s presence at the dinner-party, my mother was obliged to add to the guest-list my brother Harold, an amiable nonentity, and his wife Amanda, an expensive clothes-horse. They were in London on holiday but would eventually return to Turkey where Harold had a job shuffling papers at the British Embassy and the clothes-horse fulfilled her vocation to be ornamental. Their combined IQ was low enough to lay a pall over any dinner-party, and to make matters worse my other brother – the one who on his good days could be described as no genius but no fool – had to speak in an important debate, a commitment which excluded him from the guest-list. Oliver, the Member of Parliament for Flaxfield, was also married to an expensive clothes-horse, but unlike Harold’s ornament, this one had reproduced. She had two small boys who made a lot of noise and occasionally smelled. My three sisters, all of whom had manufactured quiet, dull, odourless daughters, were united in being very catty about Oliver’s lively sons.
My eldest sister, Henrietta, lived in Wiltshire; she had married a wealthy landowner and life was all tweeds and gun-dogs interspersed with the occasional hunt ball. My second sister, Arabella, had married a wealthy industrialist and now divided her time between London, Rome and her villa at Juan-les-Pins. My third sister, Sylvia, had been unable to marry anyone wealthy, but fortunately her husband was clever at earning a living on the Stock Exchange so they lived in a chic mews house in Chelsea where Sylvia read glossy magazines and tended her plants and told the au pair how to bring up the baby. My mother disapproved of the fact that Sylvia did no charity work. Henrietta toiled ceaselessly for the Red Cross and even Arabella gave charity balls for UNICEF whenever she could remember which country she was living in, but Sylvia, dreaming away among her plants, was too shy to do more than donate clothes to the local church.
I was mildly fond of Sylvia. She was the sister closest to me in age, but since we were so different there had been no jealousy, no fights. Having nothing in common we had inevitably drifted apart after her marriage, but whenever I felt life was intolerable I would head for her mews and sob on her sofa. Sylvia would ply me with instant coffee and chocolate digestive biscuits – an unimaginative response, perhaps, but there are worse ways of showing affection.
All my sisters were good-looking and Arabella was sexy. Henrietta could have been sexy but was too busy falling in love with gun-dogs to bother. Sylvia could have been sexy too but her husband liked her to look demurely chaste so she did. They all spoke in sporano voices with the affected upper-class accent which in those days was beginning to die out. I was a contralto and I had taken care to speak with a standard BBC accent ever since I had been teased by the middle-class fiends at my vile country preparatory school for ‘speaking la-di-da’. My sisters had escaped this experience. They had attended an upper-class establishment in London before being shovelled off to an equally upper-class boarding school, but in 1945 my parents were able to reclaim Flaxton Hall, which had been requisitioned during the war, and they were both anxious to spend time in the country while they reorganised their home. I was then eight, too old for kindergarten, too young to be shovelled off to boarding school. Daily incarceration at the hell-hole at Flaxfield, three miles from our home at Flaxton Pauncefoot, proved inevitable.
Possibly it was this torturous educational experience which set me apart from my sisters, but it seemed to me I had always been the odd one out.
‘That child gets plainer every time I see her,’ said Horrible Henrietta once to Absolutely-the-Bottom Arabella when they rolled home from Benenden for the school holidays. Those broad shoulders are almost a deformity – she’s going to wind up looking exactly like a man.’
‘Maybe she’s changing sex. That would explain the tomboyish behaviour and the gruff voice …’
‘Mama, can’t something be done about Venetia’s eyebrows? She’s beginning to look like an ape …’
‘Mama, have you ever thought of shaving Venetia’s head and giving her a wig? That frightful hair really does call for drastic measures …”
My mother, who was fundamentally a nice-natured woman whenever she wasn’t worshipping her plants, did her best to stamp on this offensive behaviour, but the attacks only surfaced in a more feline form when I reached adolescence.
‘Can’t someone encourage poor darling Venetia to take an interest in clothes? Of course I know we can’t all look like a fashion-plate in Vogue, but …’
‘Venetia, my sweet, you simply can’t wear that shade of lipstick or people will think you’re a transvestite from 1930s’ Berlin …’
Even my brothers lapsed into brutality occasionally.
‘Oliver, you’ve got to help me find a young man for Venetia –’
‘Oh God, Mama, don’t ask me!’
‘Harold, do explain to Venetia how ill-advised it is for a young girl to talk about philosophy at dinner-parties – she simply takes no notice when I tell her it’s so dreadfully showy and peculiar –’
‘Certainly, Mama. Now look here, Venetia old girl – and remember I speak purely out of fraternal affection—your average man doesn’t like clever women unless they’re real sizzlers, and since you’ll never be a real sizzler …’
‘Poor Venetia!’ said Absolutely-the-Bottom Arabella to Horrible Henrietta when she knew quite well I was within earshot. ‘No sex appeal.’
‘Well!’ said my father with a sigh of relief once his third daughter was married. ‘Now I can sit back and relax! I don’t have to worry about Venetia, do I? She’ll never be a femme fatale.’
‘… and I can’t tell you how glad I am,’ I overheard my mother confiding to her best friend, ‘that Venetia will inevitably have a quieter life than the others. When I think of all I went through with Arabella – not to mention Henrietta – and even dearest Sylvia was capable of being a little too fast occasionally …’
I remembered that remark as I dressed for dinner on the night of the Aysgarth-Ashworth reunion, and wished I could be a sizzler so fast that no one would see me for dust. I slid into my best dress, which was an interesting shade of mud, but unfortunately I had put on weight with the result that the material immediately wrinkled over my midriff when I dragged up the zip. I tried my second-best dress. The zip got stuck. My third-best dress, which had a loose-fitting waist, was wearable but hopelessly out of fashion and my fourth-best dress transformed me into a sausage again. In rage I returned to number three in the hope that I could divert attention from its unfashionable lines by swathing myself in jewellery.
‘Darling, you look like a Christmas tree!’ exclaimed my mother aghast as she glanced into the room to inspect my progress. ‘Do take off those frightful bracelets – and what on earth is Aunt Maud’s diamond hatpin doing in your hair?’
I sank down on the bed as the door closed. Then in despair I tore away all the jewellery and began to wallop my impossible hair with a brush. Eventually I heard the guests arriving, and after a long interval Harold was dispatched to drag me into the fray.
‘Come along, old girl – everyone’s thinking you must have got locked in the lavatory!’
Loathing the entire world and wishing myself a thousand miles away I followed him downstairs. The sound of animated conversation drifted towards us from the drawing-room, and as I pictured everyone looking matchlessly elegant I had to fight the urge to run screaming through the streets to Sylvia’s house in Chelsea.
‘Here she is!’ chirped idiotic Harold as I finally made my entrance.
All heads swivelled to gaze at my dead dress and diabolical hair. I had a fleeting impression of an unknown couple regarding me with mild astonishment, but just as I was wondering if it were possible to die of humiliation, my Mr Dean exclaimed warmly: ‘My dear Venetia, how very delightful you look!’ and he held out his hands to me with a smile.
IV
It was Aysgarth’s kindness which first attracted me to Christianity; the contrast between his attitude and the callous remarks of the non-believers in my family was so great that I felt the explanation could only be theological. It was small wonder that I hero-worshipped him from an early age, but I must make it clear that I was never in love with him. Such a possibility was inconceivable, first because he was a married clergyman, a creature permanently unavailable for a grand passion, and second because he was over fifty years old and therefore incapable of being classed by my youthful brain as an object of sexual desire. Moreover Aysgarth had become considerably plainer since I had first met him in 1946. By the time of the Ashworth dinner-party eleven years later his springy brown hair was smoother, straighter and a shop-soiled shade of white, while his deeply-lined face was marred by pouches under the eyes. He was also much heavier, not repulsively fat but markedly four-square. ‘Aysgarth’s built like a peasant,’ my father remarked once, not meaning to be unkind but unable to abstain from that insensitive frankness which can be such an unfortunate trait of the aristocracy.
However after Aysgarth’s heroic kindness to me at the beginning of that dinner-party, I would hardly have cared if he had been built like an elephant, and as soon as Primrose and I had the chance for a quick word I said to her enviously: ‘You’re so damned lucky to have a father like that.’
‘Isn’t he wonderful? All other men seem so dreary in comparison.’
Immediately I felt annoyed with myself for giving her the opportunity to drool; once Primrose started flaunting her Elektra complex she was nauseous. ‘Professor Ashworth doesn’t look too bad,’ I said in the hope of diverting her. ‘In fact I’d say he was rather well preserved for a man of his age.’
After my embarrassing entry into the room my mother had cursorily introduced me to the Ashworths, but afterwards the Professor had been buttonholed by Harold while Mrs Ashworth had been cornered by my fascinated father so I had had no opportunity to converse with them. I now paused to inspect the Professor with care. He was a tall man who had kept his figure; I learned later that he had excelled at games in his youth and still possessed a single-figure handicap as a golfer. Middle age had given him a receding hairline, but his curly dark hair was streaked in just the right places with just the right shade of glamorous silver. He had brown eyes, a straight nose, a firm jaw with a cleft chin, and deep lines about his strong mouth. These lines, which immediately suggested past suffering, reminded me he had once been a prisoner of war.
I opened my mouth to remark to Primrose how rare it was to encounter a handsome cleric, but at that moment we were interrupted by James, Aysgarth’s soldier son, and I was obliged to endure a lot of jolly talk about nothing. Nevertheless I kept an eye on the Professor. He was gliding around, displaying a formidable social technique as he talked to everyone in turn. From various syllables which reached my ears I gathered he was even able to talk to Harold’s clothes-horse about fashion.
Eventually Primrose was unable to resist abandoning me to move to her father’s side, jolly James decided to take a hand in passing around the canapés (our butler Pond was most put out) and I was just pretending to inspect my mother’s somewhat constipated flower arrangement when the future Bishop of Starbridge materialised at my elbow and said with such a polished charm that I even thought for a moment that he was genuinely interested in me: ‘I hear you’ve been visiting Florence. It’s a beautiful city, isn’t it?’
‘Possibly,’ I said, determined not to simper at him merely because he was one of the most distinguished churchmen in England, ‘but I don’t like Abroad.’
‘In that case I assume you’re glad to be home!’
‘Not specially, but don’t let’s waste time talking about me, Professor. I’m not a bit interesting, although it’s very kind of you to pretend that I am. Why don’t you tell me all about you?’
I had pierced the cast-iron professional charm. ‘Ah, so you’re a listener!’ he exclaimed with a seemingly genuine amusement. ‘How delightful!’
Mrs Ashworth, slender and sleek in a black dress, chose that moment to interrupt us. My first impression had been that she was much younger than her husband, but now I saw that she was probably his contemporary; her neck had that crêpe-like look which afflicts women past the menopause, but she was so immaculately made up that one barely noticed the tell-tale signs of age. Her dark hair was swept back from her forehead and drawn into a bun at the nape of her neck. Her rimless spectacles gave her a chaste, schoolmistressy look which was curiously at odds with the wicked little dress which clung to her svelte figure, and at once I decided she was far more interesting than her husband. The Professor seemed a very typical product of the best public schools and universities, but Mrs Ashworth, whom I found impossible to place against any definitive background, didn’t seem typical of anything.
She was saying lightly to her husband: ‘Vamping young girls again, darling?’
‘Indeed I am – I’ve just discovered Miss Flaxton’s a listener.’
‘Ah, a femme fatale!’ said Mrs Ashworth, regarding me with a friendly interest as I mentally reeled at her choice of phrase. ‘How clever of you, Miss Flaxton! Men adore good listeners – they have a great need to pour out their hearts regularly to sympathetic women.’
‘I do it all the time myself,’ said the Professor, effortlessly debonair. ‘Apart from golf it’s my favourite hobby.’
‘How very intriguing that sounds!’ said Aysgarth, sailing into our midst with his champagne glass clasped tightly in his hand. ‘Am I allowed to ask what this hobby is or should I preserve a discreet silence?’
There was a small but awkward pause during which I was the only one who laughed – a fact which startled me because although the remark could have been classed as risqué it could hardly have been described as offensive. Yet both Ashworths were as motionless as if Aysgarth had made some error of taste, and Aysgarth himself immediately began to behave as if he had committed a faux pas. ‘Sorry,’ he mumbled. ‘Bad joke. Silly of me.’
The Professor made a lightning recovery. ‘No, no!’ he said, smooth as glass. ‘I was merely startled because you seemed to materialise out of nowhere!’
‘Just thought I’d seize the chance for a quick word before we all go in to dinner –’
‘Of course – I was thinking only a moment ago that I’d talked to everyone in the room except you –’
‘Seems ages since we last met –’
‘Yes, it’s certainly a long time –’
‘Oxford ‘fifty-two, wasn’t it?’ said Aysgarth, having regained his equilibrium with the aid of a large swig of champagne. ‘That weekend when we were both guests of the Master of Balliol.’
‘No, you’ve seen Charles since then,’ said Mrs Ashworth. ‘We met in London when we all helped the Dean of Westminster recover from the Coronation.’
‘So we did! I’d quite forgotten … I’m sorry, I can’t quite remember – dear me, I’m beginning to sound like an amnesiac – but did I ever call you Lyle?’
‘I really have no idea,’ said Mrs Ashworth, as if such a feat of memory was well beyond her capabilities, ‘but please do in future. Did I ever call you Neville?’
‘Neville!’ I exclaimed. ‘But no one calls him Neville nowadays – he’s always Stephen!’
‘Ah,’ said Mrs Ashworth, ‘but you see, I met him before the war when Bishop Jardine appointed him Archdeacon of Starbridge. I was Mrs Jardine’s companion at the time.’
Much intrigued I said: ‘But how romantic that you should now be returning in such style to the house where you were once a mere companion!’
‘It would indeed be romantic if it were true, but the Jardines lived in the old episcopal palace which is now the Choir School, whereas Charles and I will be living – thank goodness! – in the South Canonry. I wouldn’t have wanted to return to the palace,’ said Mrs Ashworth serenely. Too many –’ She hesitated but for no more than a second ‘– poignant memories.’
Aysgarth said: ‘Do you regret the loss of the palace, Ashworth?’ but the Professor replied promptly: ‘Not in the least – and my dear fellow, if you’re going to call my wife Lyle, I really don’t see why you should now fight shy of calling me Charles! I only hope I have your permission to call you Stephen in the interesting times which I’m sure lie ahead for us all.’
Aysgarth at once became almost inarticulate with a shyness which I suspected was triggered not only by his social inferiority complex, but by his gratitude that Ashworth should be making such a marked effort to be friendly. He could only manage to say: ‘Yes. Stephen. Fine. Please do,’ and toss off the remains of his champagne.
Appearing in contrast wholly relaxed Ashworth observed: ‘It really is most remarkable that our careers should have coincided like this – in fact, if you knew how often Lyle and I have been telling ourselves recently that God moves in mysterious ways –’
‘Darling,’ said Mrs Ashworth, ‘if you quote that ghastly cliché once more I shall be tempted to strangle you with your brand-new pectoral cross.’
‘More champagne anyone?’ enquired jolly James, still playing the butler.
His father at once held out his glass. ‘“Well, I don’t mind if I do, sir!” as Colonel Chinstrap used to say on ITMA –’
‘Oh, how I adored ITMA!’ said my mother, drifting over to us and eyeing her constipated flower arrangement as if she had suddenly realised it needed a laxative. ‘Venetia, can you pass around the cigarettes? Pond seems to have disappeared in a huff for some reason …’
‘That bishop-to-be is going to look simply too heavenly in gaiters,’ Harold’s clothes-horse was drawling as she demolished her third dry martini.
‘Can someone stop young James playing the butler?’ muttered my father. ‘Pond’s taken violent umbrage.’
‘… and what I absolutely can’t understand,’ idiotic Harold was burbling in a corner, ‘is how Pater, who can’t bear going to church and has always said “Boo!” to God, has got himself mixed up with these high-powered clerical wallahs.’
‘He’ll probably wind up taking the sacrament on his deathbed,’ said Primrose, ‘like Lord Marchmain in Brideshead.’
‘Brideshead?’ said Harold. ‘Where’s that?’
‘I’m damned hungry,’ said my father to my mother. ‘Are they all dead drunk in the kitchen?’
‘Dinner is served, my Lord!’ thundered Pond reproachfully from the doorway, and with relief we all descended to the dining-room.
V
The next evening Aysgarth called at six o’clock with a note of thanks and a bunch of carnations for my mother, but found only me at home. My mother had travelled down to Flaxton Pauncefoot that morning and my father was attending a Lords’ debate on education. Harold and the clothes-horse had not yet returned from a day at the races.
When Pond showed Aysgarth into the drawing-room I was reading Professor Ashworth’s latest book, St Augustine and the Pelagian Heresy: the Origins of His Theology Concerning God’s Grace, which I had borrowed from the library. The Professor wrote in a cool, lucid prose which created an impression of scholarly detachment and yet succeeded in being surprisingly readable – but perhaps that was because he was writing of St Augustine’s fight to master his sex drive, a fight which was to have immense repercussions both for Christianity and for the bluff heretic Pelagius who had said (more or less) that man could jolly well pull himself up by his own bootstraps and conquer sin not by God’s grace but by will-power and a stiff upper lip.
Pelagius, it is hardly necessary to add, had been a Briton.
‘Oh, I’ve read that book,’ said Aysgarth as we settled down for a delectable discussion of the dinner-party. ‘I thought it very bad. Like St Augustine Charles’s twin obsessions are heresy and sex. Apparently up at Cambridge all his divinity undergraduates refer to him as Anti-Sex Ashworth.’
‘How extraordinary! He seemed quite normal.’
‘No, no – rabid against fornication and adultery. Such a mistake! In my opinion there are far worse sins than the sexual errors, and – whoops! Here’s Pond with the drinks.’
Pond deposited the sherry and whisky decanters, the soda-siphon and a suitable selection of glasses on the side-table and waited for orders, but I waved him away.
‘Help yourself, Mr Dean.’
