Scandalous Risks

TWO

‘We need to be accepted as persons, as whole persons, for our own sake.’

JOHN A. T. ROBINSON

Suffragan Bishop of Woolwich 1959–1969

Writing about Honest to God in the Sunday Mirror, 7th April 1963

I

Aysgarth drank quite a bit. Not quite a lot. But quite a bit. There’s a difference. ‘Quite a lot’ means serious drinking twice a day. ‘Quite a bit’ means serious drinking occasionally and moderate drinking in between. Aysgarth was apparently the kind of drinker who seldom touched alcohol during the day but who regularly had a couple of whiskies at six o’clock. If he went to a dinner-party later he would then drink a glass of sherry before the meal, a couple of glasses of wine with the food and a hefty measure of port once the cloth was drawn. This was by no means considered a remarkable consumption in the political circles in which my father moved, and probably the upper reaches of London ecclesiastical society also regarded such drinking habits as far from excessive, yet by 1957 my father was afraid a rumour might circulate that Aysgarth was a secret drinker.

‘He keeps his bottle of whisky behind the Oxford Dictionary in his study!’ my father said scandalised to my mother after this eccentricity had been innocently revealed to him. ‘What a risk to take! He’s paying lip-service, of course, to the tradition that clergymen shouldn’t indulge in spirits, but what are the servants going to think when they discover the clandestine bottle? He’d do better to keep it openly on the sideboard!’

‘Since Mr Aysgarth hasn’t had a lifetime’s experience of dealing with servants,’ said my mother delicately, ‘perhaps he thinks they won’t find out about the bottle.’

‘I disillusioned him, I assure you, but he didn’t turn a hair. “I’m not a drunk and my conscience is clear!” he declared, not believing a word I said, and he even had the nerve to add: “‘Honi soit qui mal y pense’!” He’s quite incorrigible.’

My father also disapproved of Aysgarth’s occasional trick of drinking too fast. On that day in 1957 as we celebrated the offer of the Starbridge deanery, he downed three glasses of champagne in a series of thirsty gulps and sighed as if longing for more. It was not offered to him. ‘Fancy drinking champagne like that!’ said my father shocked to me afterwards. ‘No breeding, of course. Not brought up to drink champagne properly.’

I opened my mouth to remind him of his blue-blooded friends who regularly consumed champagne as if it were lemonade, but then I decided not to argue. I was in too good a mood. Instead I merely proffered the opinion that Aysgarth was more than entitled to a quick swill after enduring his wife’s nervous breakdown and the agonising worry over his future.

I was still savouring my relief that the crisis had ended when I learnt that a new cloud had dawned on the ecclesiastical horizon. Calling on us the next day Aysgarth confessed his fear that an old adversary of his might be appointed bishop of Starbridge.

It was six o’clock. (Aysgarth always timed his visits to coincide with the possibility of refreshment.) My mother was attending a committee meeting of the Royal Society of Rose-Growers. Once again my father and I joined forces to support our harassed cleric.

‘Have a whisky, my dear fellow,’ said my father kindly. ‘We’ll pretend you’re not wearing your clerical collar and can drink spirits with a clear conscience. Who’s this monster who might be offered the bishopric?’

‘Oh, he’s no monster!’ said Aysgarth hastily, sinking into the nearest armchair as my father added soda-water to a shot of scotch. ‘He’s just someone I’d be happy never to meet again.’ ‘Your sworn enemy!’ I said, reading between the Christian lines.

‘Don’t be facetious, Venetia,’ said my father. ‘This is serious. Do you have no power of veto, Aysgarth? Surely the Dean and Chapter are always consulted about the appointment of a new bishop?’

‘Unofficially, yes, but officially we have to take the card we’re dealt – and bearing in mind the fact that I’ve only just won the deanery by the skin of my teeth I’m hardly in a position to raise even an informal objection to this man.’

‘But who on earth is he, for God’s sake?’

‘The rumour bouncing off the walls of Church House,’ said Aysgarth after a huge gulp of whisky, ‘is that Charles Ashworth’s been approached for the job.’

‘Oh, him! In that case you’ve nothing to worry about. He’ll never take it.’

‘I know he’s already turned down two bishoprics, but this could be the one bishopric he’s unable to refuse. He’d rank alongside the bishops of London, Durham and Winchester – there’d be a seat available immediately in the House of Lords – he’d be only ninety minutes by train from the centres of power in the capital – and as if all these advantages weren’t sufficient to seduce him, he’d have the challenge of pulling the Theological College together, and he’s an expert on theological education.’

‘I’ve never heard of this man,’ I said. ‘Where’s he been hiding himself? What’s he like?’

‘Oh, he’s the most charming fellow!’ said my father with enthusiasm. ‘Very keen on cricket. A first-class brain. And he’s got a nice little wife too, really a very nice little wife, one of those little women who listen so beautifully that they always make a man feel ten feet tall –’

‘The Reverend Dr Charles Ashworth,’ said Aysgarth, ignoring this sentimental drivel as he responded to my demand for information, ‘is Lyttelton Professor of Divinity at Cambridge and a Canon of Cambridge Cathedral.’

‘So what’s wrong with him?’

‘Nothing. We’re just temperamentally incompatible and theologically in different camps.’

‘Maybe he’ll turn down the job after all!’ I said brightly after we had all observed a moment of heavy silence. ‘Why did he turn down the previous bishoprics?’

My father commented: ‘Being a bishop isn’t every clergyman’s idea of heaven,’ and Aysgarth said: ‘Ashworth preferred life in his academic ivory tower.’ However as soon as this statement had been made he modified it by adding rapidly: ‘No, I shouldn’t say that. Ashworth came down from his ivory tower in ‘thirty-nine when he volunteered to be an army chaplain. That was something I never did. Then he was a prisoner of war for three years. I never had to endure that either. After the war he did return to academic life but not, I’m sure, because he wanted to escape from the world. He must have felt genuinely called to resume his career of writing and teaching, and I’m sure this call is why he’s turned down the previous bishoprics.’

‘So why should his call now change?’

‘Because the offer’s alluring enough to make him wonder if God might have other plans for him.’

‘Let’s get this quite straight, Aysgarth,’ said my father, always anxious to eliminate God from any conversation. ‘Have you actually had a row with this man or is this just a case of polite mutual antipathy?’

‘In 1946,’ said Aysgarth, ‘we had such a row that he smashed his glass in the fireplace and stormed out of the room.’

‘Impossible!’ said my father, balking at the thought of a clergyman behaving like a Cossack. ‘Ashworth’s such a charmer! What on earth was the row about?’

‘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 soprano 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.