Scandalous Risks. Susan Howatch
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but the river glided on, the brilliant light glittering so fiercely on the water that my eyes began to ache. Looking away I saw that my right hand was gripping the arm of the seat. The paint on my fingernails was the colour of blood, and suddenly I saw myself as someone who had long suffered a debilitating haemorrhage but had abandoned all hope of a cure.
‘You’re wasting your time,’ I said. ‘I’m beyond liberation. Run away and liberate someone else.’ And then before I could stop myself I was exclaiming in despair: ‘I wish I’d never come back to this place! Usually I never even think of that bloody, bloody year –’
‘Which year?’
‘1963, but I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘That was the year of Honest to God, wasn’t it? I remember it well – and I remember you too, full of joie de vivre –’
‘Oh yes, that was me, oozing joie de vivre from every pore –’
‘So what went wrong?’
There was another silence before I answered: ‘Well, you see …’ But I was unable to finish the sentence. Then I said: ‘Well, to put the matter in a nutshell …’ But again I had to stop. It was only after yet another silence that I heard myself say in a voice devoid of emotion as I confessed the emotion I could never forget: ‘Well, the trouble was … I became so very, very fond of my darling Mr Dean.’
II
My Mr Dean had been christened Norman Neville and during the course of his career he had possessed various clerical titles, but I shall refer to him throughout this narrative by his surname, Aysgarth, because it was the one designation which never changed. He had left the name Norman behind in infancy when his mother decided to call him Neville, and he had left the name Neville behind in the 1940s when his ghastly second wife insisted on addressing him as Stephen; she had declared that the name Neville had been ruined by the unfortunate Mr Chamberlain, and that only a pure, noble, serious name such as Stephen could ever be good enough for the man she intended to marry. It had apparently never occurred to her that these dreary adjectives hardly did her husband justice, but Aysgarth, whose tolerance of his wife’s peculiarities bordered on the masochistic, had raised no objection to this despotic rechristening, and after his second marriage in 1945 the number of people who knew him as Neville had steadily declined.
‘If any woman tried to alter my name I’d put her in her place pretty damned quickly, I assure you!’ my father declared once to my mother when I was growing up, although in fact Aysgarth’s Christian name was irrelevant to him. My father was old-fashioned enough to call all men outside our family by their surnames, so although he and Aysgarth were close friends the relationship sounded more formal than it was. For years after their first meeting Aysgarth had addressed my father as ‘my Lord’ or ‘Lord Flaxton’, but in 1957 after Aysgarth received his great preferment my father had said to him: ‘Time to dispense with the title – address me as Flaxton in future.’ This invitation, so condescendingly delivered, was intended – and received – as a compliment. Indeed Aysgarth, who was the son of a failed Yorkshire draper, was so overcome that he blushed like a schoolboy.
‘Dear Mr Aysgarth!’ mused my mother long ago in the 1940s when I was still a child. ‘Not quite a gentleman, of course, but such a charming way with him at dinner-parties!’
My father and I first met Aysgarth on the same day in 1946. I was nine, my father was fifty-five and Aysgarth, then the Archdeacon of Starbridge, was forty-four. I had been sent home early from school after throwing an inkpot at some detestable girl who had called my father a ‘barmy peer’. I hated this local hell-hole and longed for a governess, but my father, whose idealism forced him to subscribe to the view that patricians should make efforts to mix with the plebeians, was resolute in sending all his daughters to school. The schools were private; my mother would certainly have balked at the prospect of her daughters being sacrificed on the altar of state education, so I never met the so-called ‘lower orders’, only the infamous middle classes who, I quickly learnt, considered it their mission in life to ‘take snooty, la-di-da pigs down a peg or two.’ If the middle classes hadn’t been so busy conquering the world for England in the nineteenth century I doubt if the upper classes would have survived into the twentieth.
‘You did quite right to throw the inkpot!’ said my father after I had defended my behaviour by telling him how he had been abused. ‘One can’t take insults lying down – I’ve no patience with Christians who waffle on about turning the other cheek!’
‘And talking of Christians,’ said my mother before my father could give his well-worn performance as an agnostic lion rampant, ‘don’t forget the Archdeacon’s calling on you this afternoon.’
‘What’s an archdeacon?’ I said, delighted that my father had supported me over the inkpot and anxious to retain his attention.
‘Look it up in the dictionary.’ He glanced at his watch, set me firmly aside and walked out.
I was skulking sulkily in the hall five minutes later when the doorbell rang and I decided to play the butler. I opened the front door. In the porch stood a short, broad-shouldered man who was dressed in a uniform which suggested an eccentric chauffeur. He had brown hair, rather bushy, and the kind of alert expression which one so often sees on the faces of gun-dogs. His eyes were a vivid blue.
‘All chauffeurs should go to the back entrance,’ I said, speaking grandly to conceal how unnerved I was by this curious apparition in gaiters.
‘I’m not a chauffeur – I’m an archdeacon,’ he said smiling at me, and asked my name. To put him to the test I answered poker-faced: ‘Vanilla,’ but he surmounted the challenge with ease. ‘How very charming and original!’ he exclaimed, not batting an eyelid, and told me I reminded him of Alice in Wonderland.
I was hardly able to believe that any adult could be so agreeable. ‘If I’m Alice,’ I said, testing him again to make sure I was not mistaken, ‘who are you?’
‘If you’re Alice, I think I’d like to be Lewis Carroll,’ said my future Mr Dean, exuding the charm which was to win my mother’s approval, and that was the moment when I knew for certain that he was my favourite kind of person, bright and sharp, quick and tough, yet kind enough to have time for a plain little girl with ink-stained fingers and an insufferable air of grandeur.
My father’s reaction to Aysgarth was startlingly similar to mine. ‘I like that man,’ he kept saying afterwards. ‘I like him.’ He sounded amazed. Hitherto he had regarded all clergymen as the victims of an intellectual aberration.
‘You’ll never believe this,’ said my mother that evening on the telephone to my elder brother in London, ‘but your father’s fallen violently in love with a clergyman – no, not the local parson who’s gone round the bend! Your father complained about the parson to the Bishop, and the Bishop sent the Archdeacon to investigate, and it’s the Archdeacon who’s won your father’s heart. Your father’s even saying he’s seen the Virgin Birth in a new light – he’s dreadfully unsettled, poor dear.’
This evidently alarmed my brother very much. Outraged squawks emerged from the telephone.
However the truth was that my father was neither suffering from the onset of senility nor undergoing a religious conversion. He was merely having to upgrade his opinion of clergymen because Aysgarth, an Oxford graduate, was one of those rare beings, my father’s intellectual equal. A clergyman who had won a first in theology could be dismissed; theology was not a subject which my father took seriously. But a clergyman who had been at Balliol, my father’s own college, and taken a first in Greats, that Olympian academic prize which even my father had had to toil to achieve – there indeed was a clergyman who defied dismissal.
‘I’ve come to the conclusion that Mr Aysgarth’s a great blessing,’ said my mother to me later. ‘Clever men like your papa become bored if they don’t have other clever men to talk to, so perhaps now he’s discovered Mr