Mystical Paths. Susan Howatch
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this. Marina had a vast circle of acquaintances and liked to shuffle them around her guest-lists to keep everyone wondering whom they were going to meet next. The privileged inner circle, which she insisted on calling her Coterie, also varied, depending on who was in favour, and the only people I knew that night were her two closest girlfriends (Emma-Louise and Holly), my friend Venetia and Michael Ashworth, the younger son of the Bishop and the brother of Charley-the-Prig.
Anyway there I was, arriving hours late at Lady Markhampton’s house in the Close, and there was Marina, not just introducing me as the Coterie’s soothsayer-in-residence but even declaiming that I was the brother of Martin Darrow the actor (I’ll get to that creep Martin later). If there was one thing I hated even more than being paraded as a psychic, it was being paraded as the brother of the famous Martin Darrow – who was only my half-brother anyway, the son of my father’s first marriage, and so much older than I was that I felt he should be keeping little Gerald company in the hereafter.
It was before the drug era, so although everyone was stoned out of their minds the culprit was merely vintage Veuve Clicquot. I drank half a glass and asked for a Coke, just to be nasty. Marina gave a little tinkling laugh and said how original I was. Fortunately I discovered some excellent sausage rolls at the buffet. They kept me quiet for a bit. The nicest person in the room was my friend Venetia – Venetia Flaxton she was in those days. I’d met her a month earlier through Charley-the-Prig. It was curious how Charley Ashworth was present when I met both Marina and Venetia. The most unlikely people can turn up at crucial moments in one’s life.
Venetia seemed a lot older than I was then because in 1963 she was twenty-six and I was only twenty, but I always liked her. I specially liked her at Marina’s orgy that night. I could see she knew I hated being paraded as a soothsayer and the brother of Martin Darrow. ‘Give the poor child a chance to merge with the crowd!’ I heard her mutter exasperated to Marina, and the next moment she had swooped to my rescue by leading me to the most striking couple in the room.
The woman was dark, not one of my steamy brunettes but a romantic heroine who looked as if she had stepped out of some Victorian novel where women were idealised as angels – or perhaps out of some Victorian painting where the female figure was supposed to represent Purity in its endless battles against Lust. She had delicate features, pale skin and fine-boned, well-bred hands. I remember thinking: I wouldn’t want to go to bed with a woman like that because I’d be too afraid of breaking her.
The man who had apparently found this purity-on-a-pedestal fragility irresistible was lounging elegantly against the mantelshelf as if he owned not only the room but the house and the entire Cathedral Close. Tall, slim and dark, he coruscated with a glamour enhanced by an air of total self-confidence, the poise of a brilliant, sophisticated man who was well accustomed to the world grovelling at his feet. This aura of extreme worldly success fascinated me. I was also intrigued by the way the sensitivity of his face was marred by a thin, brutal mouth which had already, as if foreshadowing his middle age, begun to turn down slightly at the corners. I was surprised later when women sighed how handsome he was. That mouth ruined the film-star looks, but women, being women, obviously found it so sexy that they were incapable of seeing it as a blemish.
‘… and do you know the Aysgarths?’ Venetia was saying to me. ‘This is Christian – and this is his wife Katie …’
I had heard much about this couple over the years, but I had never before managed to meet them. Christian’s father was the Dean of Starbridge, the priest who ran the Cathedral. A self-made man, he had a considerable reputation as an administrator and no inhibitions about flaunting his powerful personality. My father disliked him but the Dean had many devoted friends and admirers not only in Starbridge itself but throughout the diocese. It was widely noted that the Bishop, like my father, was not among them.
In the early 1940s when my father had first met him, the Dean had been the Archdeacon of Starbridge, but in 1946 he had moved to London to become a canon of Westminster Abbey and an interval of eleven years had followed before he had returned to the diocese to take charge of the Cathedral. His eccentric second wife, Christian’s stepmother, invited me to a few parties at the Deanery because I happened to be only eighteen months younger than Christian’s brother Sandy, but when after one boring visit I consistently refused these invitations she at last gave up issuing them. I didn’t care for Sandy, whose idea of fun consisted of reading Greek poetry – in Greek – and the Dean’s other children were all either much older than I was or much younger.
Christian was fifteen years my senior, a fact which helps to explain why I had never met him before Marina’s Starbridge orgy; by the time his father returned to the diocese in 1957, Christian was a don up at Oxford, and once I had rejected his stepmother’s attempts to draw me into the Deanery’s junior social set, there was no reason why he should ever have encountered me. I did go to the Cathedral Close regularly to see the Ashworths, but since the Bishop and the Dean were constantly at loggerheads, contact between the Deanery and the South Canonry was minimal. Certainly on my visits to the Bishop’s house there was never an Aysgarth in sight.
Christian was the eldest child of the Dean’s first marriage. The second son, Norman, was a barrister who lectured in law; he was also at Marina’s orgy that night. There was a third son, James, whom at that time I had never met, a daughter, Primrose, whom I had glimpsed when Mrs Aysgarth had initially succeeded in dragging me to the Deanery, and finally my contemporary, Sandy-the-Greek-Freak, whose real name was Alexander. Elizabeth and Pip, Dean Aysgarth’s two offspring by his weird second wife, were still children at the time of Marina’s Starbridge party, and I knew little about them except that Pip was a pupil at the Cathedral Choir School and Elizabeth had been nicknamed Lolita by various ordinands at the Theological College.
‘Your father was the Principal of the Theological College back in the ’forties, wasn’t he?’ said Christian to me when we finally met that night. ‘I can remember him visiting us just before Father left Starbridge to take up the canonry at Westminster.’
‘Ah,’ I said, very young, very gauche.
‘And I remember Sandy telling me about you,’ pursued Christian. ‘“What’s the point of reading Homer,” you said to him, “when you could read Shakespeare instead?” Very shocking that was to Sandy! But I thought: there goes a man after my own xenophobic heart – a rampant chauvinist who goes to bed wrapped in the Union Jack every night!’
Everyone laughed as I tried to assemble a sentence which would prove I was no mental defective, but before I could speak, my friend Venetia exclaimed: ‘Stop teasing him, Christian! You don’t have to be xenophobic to prefer Shakespeare to Homer!’
‘No, but it helps.’ Suddenly he smiled at me and at once became the Oxford don who was well accustomed to socially inept undergraduates. ‘I seem to remember you’re reading divinity at the Other Place,’ he said kindly. ‘How are you getting on?’
‘Okay.’
‘I read theology up at Oxford, although my special subject is now medieval philosophy. Going to be ordained?’
‘Yep.’
‘Good for you. You’re a braver man than I ever was.’
‘Darling!’ said his wife reproachfully. ‘You can’t imply you’re lacking in courage just because you weren’t called to be a clergyman!’
‘The Devil only knows what I was called to be,’ said Christian, turning his back on her, and at once I was aware of tension, of darkness, of a tingling on the spine.
Marina surged past me into the middle of the group. ‘Christian, did I ever tell you I met Nicky when I was lying semi-nude in a punt on the Cam?’
‘I should think you met a lot of people, my love, if you lay around semi-nude in a punt on the Cam.’ He raised his voice to address a man who had begun to drift towards us from a group by the window. ‘Perry, come and meet the bravest man in this room – Marina’s soothsayer’s heading for a cassock and dog-collar!’ And to me he added: ‘Nick, this is Peregrine Palmer, a very old friend of mine.’
‘Hullo,