Scandalous Risks. Susan Howatch
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out to grow daffodils in the Scilly Isles, and by 1963 only I was left in ‘Stephen’s Little Harem’ – ‘The last peppermint cream left in the box!’ as my chocolate-loving Mr Dean put it so saucily, much to his wife’s annoyance.
‘You really should make more effort to get married, Venetia,’ she said soon afterwards. ‘In the game of life women who don’t marry are inevitably regarded as such amateurs, and you wouldn’t want people to look down on you pityingly, would you, my dear? That’s one thing a clever girl can never endure.’
I could have withstood that woman better if she had been merely mad and bad. But it was her talent for disembowelling her victims with the knife of truth which made her so thoroughly dangerous to know.
It was 1963. The innocent days were almost over, and in the early spring, just after John Robinson, the suffragan bishop of Woolwich, published the book which was to shake the Church of England to its foundations, the foundations of my own world were at last rocked by the earthquake of change. Exasperated by my failure to stay in any job longer than a year, my father went to great trouble to obtain a post for me at the Liberal Party’s headquarters. I handed in my notice a week later.
‘How dare you do this to me!’ shouted my father, who was now seventy-two and even less capable of managing a recalcitrant daughter.
‘My dear Papa, I’m the victim, not you! I was the one who actually had to work at that ghastly place!’
‘Well, if you think you can loaf around under my roof doing nothing for the next six months –’
‘Nothing would induce me to loaf around under your roof a day longer!’ I said, almost twenty-six years old and finally summoning the strength to burst out of my luxurious prison. ‘I’m off to Starbridge to meditate on God and contemplate Eternity – which is exactly what you ought to be doing at your age!’
And having delivered myself of this speech, which could be guaranteed to infuriate any humanist past endurance, I embarked on my journey into adventure.
‘But now “God” is news!’
JOHN A. T. ROBINSON
Suffragan Bishop of Woolwich 1959–1969 Writing about Honest to God in the Sunday Mirror, 7th April 1963
I
At Waterloo Station I encountered Charley Ashworth, the Bishop’s elder son, whom I had occasionally met in Starbridge during my visits to the Aysgarths. He was a year my junior, small, chatty and bumptious. It was generally agreed that the bumptiousness masked an inferiority complex which had arisen because he was plain while his brother Michael was handsome. After completing his National Service Charley had gone up to Cambridge, where he had taken a first in divinity, and in 1961 he had entered a theological college, also in Cambridge, to learn how to be a clergyman. This exercise, which hardly seemed compatible with his pugnacious personality, was still going on.
‘Good heavens – Venetia!’ he exclaimed, speeding towards me with a suitcase in one hand and a copy of Bishop Robinson’s Honest to God in the other. ‘What are you doing here?’ He made it sound as if I were trespassing.
‘Just admiring the view from platform twelve.’ I had set down my bags in order to rest my wrists; I never managed to travel light. Around us throbbed the echoing noise and mouldy smell of a mighty station. I had been gazing at the inert train nearby and trying to decide which end would have the best chance of offering me a solitary journey.
‘But I’d heard you were running the Liberal Party!’ Charley was protesting as I realised my hopes of solitude had been dashed.
‘I decided I wasn’t political.’
‘Good for you! Personally I think women should keep out of politics.’
‘And what do you think they should keep in?’
‘The home, of course.’ He heaved open the door of the nearest carriage and flung out his hand generously towards the interior as if he were offering a child a treat. ‘In you go!’
‘Could you deal with my bags?’ I said. ‘We girls are such delicate little flowers that we have to rely on strong brave boys like you to help us whenever we’re not sitting at home being plastic dolls.’
‘Very funny!’ said Charley good-humouredly, my sarcasm quite lost on him, and without complaint turned his attention to my bulging suitcases.
‘How are you getting on with Honest to God?’ I enquired as he tossed his book on to the seat.
‘Oh, have you heard of it?’
‘I can read, you know. OUR IMAGE OF GOD MUST GO, SAYS BISHOP –’
‘That article in the Observer was a disgrace!’
‘Did you think so? I adored it – such fun when a Church of England bishop declares to all and sundry that he doesn’t believe in God!’
‘But that’s not what Robinson’s saying at all –’
‘That’s what laymen think he’s saying.’
‘And that’s exactly why the book’s a disgrace! It’s so bad for laymen. My father says that Robinson’s being thoroughly irresponsible as well as intellectually slipshod, and I agree with him,’ said Charley, exuding outraged virtue as he heaved my bags up on to the rack. ‘My father and I always agree on everything.’ Closing the carriage door he pulled down the window and began to scan the platform.
‘Tedious for you,’ I said. ‘My father and I are in perpetual disagreement. Life’s just one long glorious row.’ But Charley, leaning out of the window, was too absorbed in some private anxiety to reply.
‘Bother the infant,’ he said at last, glancing at his watch. ‘He’s cutting it very fine.’
‘What infant’s this?’
‘I doubt if you’d know him – he’s only twenty. He’s supposed to be staying tonight with us at the South Canonry.’ Again he hung out of the window in an agony of suspense but a moment later he was bawling ‘Hey!’ in relief and wildly waving his arm.
A tall, pale youth, earnest and bespectacled, appeared at the door and was hustled into the carriage. He wore very clean jeans and a spotless blue shirt with a black leather jacket. All he was carrying was a duffle-bag. ‘Sorry I’m late,’ he said. ‘I got lost on the underground.’ Unaware that Charley and I knew each other he wasted no time looking at me but removed his glasses and began to polish them with an exquisitely ironed white handkerchief. In the distance the guard’s whistle blew and after a preliminary jerk the train began to glide out of the station.
‘Venetia,’ Charley said, remembering his manners, ‘this is Nicholas Darrow. Nick, this is the Honourable Venetia Flaxton.’
‘I find it more comfortable these days to drop the Honourable,’ I said. ‘Hullo, Nick.’
Replacing his spectacles he looked me straight in the eyes and at once I felt as if I stood in a plunging lift. ‘Hi,’ he said politely without smiling. His eyes were an unnaturally clear shade of grey.
‘Have we met before?’ said my voice. I sounded as unnerved as I felt, but I knew that the obvious explanation for my loss of poise – sexual bewitchment – was quite wrong. He was a plain young man. Yet somehow he contrived to be compulsively watchable.
‘No, we haven’t met,’ he was answering tranquilly, opening his duffle-bag and pulling out a book. It was Honest to God.
‘Nick’s father was principal of the Starbridge Theological College back in the ’forties,’ Charley said. ‘Maybe Nick’s jogging your memory of him.’