Glittering Images (17 page)

Other clergymen fell into error. Why not Jardine? Suddenly, for clouded reasons beyond my comprehension, I felt an urge to prove that Jardine had at least once since his ordination been guilty of a serious moral failure – and that was the moment when I first started speculating seriously on the subject of Loretta Staviski.

Jardine’s threat to discuss the Virgin Birth with me over the port was never realized. One of the lay dinner-guests, Starbridge’s most distinguished architect, proved to be a non-smoker who could not be dispatched to the smoking-room, and out of courtesy Jardine at first avoided splitting theological hairs. However after a discussion of the arrests which had recently taken place in the German Evangelical Church the architect said deferentially, ‘Talking of clerical matters, Bishop, I hope you won’t mind me mentioning the A. P. Herbert Bill. I’m interested in your opinion of it, particularly as I too think that the grounds for divorce should be extended, but I’m still not sure how you justify your views theologically. What makes you so sure that Christ wasn’t laying down the law on this particular subject but only stating an ethical guideline?’

This was clearly an intelligent sympathetic layman who deserved to be encouraged. Jardine said kindly, ‘Well, the first thing you must remember is that Our Lord wasn’t a twentieth-century Englishman brought up in a culture which glorifies the modest understatement. He came from the Middle East and in the culture of his day people communicated important truths by the use of striking word-pictures, statements which we would call exaggerations. A well-known example of this is when Christ says: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God”. A modern Englishman would merely say: “He can’t do it”.’

‘So in other words what you’re saying is –’ But the architect could not quite relate this warning about the un-Englishness of Christ to the teaching on divorce.

‘The next thing you should remember,’ said Jardine, paying no attention to the interruption as he busily laid the foundations of his argument, ‘is that one should always try to see Christ against the background in which he lived. At the time of his ministry there were in fact two opposing attitudes to divorce within Judaism. One group, the Hillel Jews, thought that divorce could be granted even for the most trivial reasons – if the wife burnt the dinner, for instance. The other group held that divorce should be granted only for adultery and only to men – in fact divorce was actually required when a man had an adulterous wife; he had no choice.’

‘Good heavens!’ said the layman, fascinated by the thought of compulsory divorce. I sensed he had almost said ‘Good God!’ but had remembered just in time that he was at the Bishop’s table.

‘Now,’ said Jardine, reassured that the layman was still conscious, ‘we come to Our Lord. What he was really doing was criticizing the lax attitude of the Hillel Jews by a heavy underlining of the teaching of the stricter school of thought. And the way he phrased this criticism was in the Middle-Eastern way: “fortissimo” by Semitic overstatement, not “pianissimo” by British understatement. He said: “What therefore God hath joined together, let no man put asunder”. Of course he was aware that both schools of thought permitted divorce, but he wasn’t talking as a lawyer and he wasn’t talking about the law. He was attacking the morality of divorce sought for trivial reasons, and he did this by emphasizing the sanctity of marriage.’

‘Ah!’ said the architect, recognizing a familiar phrase. ‘Sanctity of marriage – yes –’

‘Let me give you a twentieth-century parallel,’ said Jardine, helping him along. ‘If I were to tell you that recently in Reno, Nevada, a woman divorced her husband because he squeezed the marital toothpaste tube from the top instead of the bottom, you might well react by saying: “Disgraceful! Marriage should be for life! Shocking debasement of the institution!” But you don’t really think that marriage should always be for life; if it breaks down in such a way that its spiritual core is destroyed – if the marriage ceases to be a marriage in any meaningful sense of the word – then you and I and many thousands of others believe that the marriage is spiritually null and should be legally terminated. And
that
in my opinion is the compassionate teaching which must inevitably lie beyond Our Lord’s statements stressing the sanctity of marriage.’

‘So what you’re saying is,’ said the layman, who was now, like a promising infant, ‘coming along nicely’, ‘Christ would have disapproved of the divorce law of Nevada but approved of the new divorce law proposed by Mr A. P. Herbert.’

‘Precisely!’ said Jardine. ‘Herbert’s Bill has two main purposes: one is to relieve suffering – and do you suppose that Christ, with all his compassion, would have objected to that? – and the second is to reinforce the sanctity of marriage by permitting the dissolution of the marital travesties, the cases where the spiritual core of the marriage has been destroyed not just by adultery but by cruelty, desertion or insanity as well – and do you suppose that Our Lord, who recoiled from the debasement of marriage, would have objected to the elimination of the marriages which had become a mockery? I think not.’

‘How clear it all seems!’ said the architect, delighted that his personal views, reached by moral inclination, could be justified theologically. ‘And how jolly to think of Christ approving of the A. P. Herbert Bill – although I suppose one might deduce that from the fact that the Bill’s now certain to become law. Bishop, do we dare say that the success of the Bill’s second reading in the House of Lords last month was God’s will?’

‘Well, it certainly wasn’t the Archbishop of Canterbury’s will,’ said Jardine, ‘but then as far as I know His Grace hasn’t yet claimed to be God. Dr Ashworth, I’m beginning to think your prolonged silence has a sinister quality. I hope you’re not thinking I should be burnt at the stake.’

‘No, we’ll acquit you of heresy today, Bishop!’ I said smiling at him, and at once saw the amusement flare in his eyes.

When one considered all the adverse circumstances, it was most bizarre how much we both liked each other.

Was he an apostate? I still could not believe it, and although his views might be startling to a layman I knew he was only treading a well-worn theological path; an examination of Christ’s words in the light of conditions prevailing in firstcentury Palestine was nowadays considered a thoroughly respectable endeavour in the attempt to look beyond the glittering image of Christ in the Gospels to the historical figure about whom so little was known. Jardine’s views on divorce were certainly open to criticism, particularly by the conservative wing of the Church, but he was a long way from a suspect Christianity, and the ardour of his conviction that compassion should be shown to the victims of hopeless marriages indicated a man who believed whole-heartedly in the reality of Christ, not an apostate who was covering up his lost belief with a few clever phrases.

Moreover on this issue Jardine was in distinguished company. Martin Luther had gone even further than A. P. Herbert in urging new grounds for divorce where the spiritual core of the marriage had been destroyed, but the trouble with such liberal views, I always thought, was that once one had embraced them it was hard to know where to stop. Unless one was careful one could so easily reason oneself into claiming that the compassion of Christ justified even divorce on the grounds of a careless squeeze of a toothpaste tube.

‘You’re looking very pensive, Dr Ashworth!’ called Lady Starmouth after my return to the drawing-room.

‘I’m still recovering from Dr Jardine’s post-prandial wisdom …’

My own views on divorce were complex. Despite my public support of Lang, who regarded Herbert’s Bill with antipathy, I privately approved the Bill on humanitarian grounds – which meant, in other words, that I was citing the compassion of Christ in order to approve extending the grounds for dissolving shattered marriages. However I did think that theologically it was difficult to argue that Christ would ever have approved of extending the grounds for divorce beyond adultery. Jardine had had a good shot at the argument, but the architect’s enthusiastic acceptance of it indicated not the strength of the thesis but the strength of Jardine’s gift for manipulating a receptive audience. In my opinion Christ had been a good Jew, not ‘liberal’ in the modern sense of extending a credo to its outer limits in the name of freedom, but ‘radical’ in the original sense of cutting back the credo to its roots to rediscover its true spirit. This radicalism was illustrated by his opposition to the Pharisees and his determination to respond not merely to the letter but to the spirit of Judaism, a spirit which encompassed a far stricter view of divorce than that envisaged by Mr A. P. Herbert.

I suddenly realized that Lady Starmouth was saying to me, ‘… and I do hope you’ll call on us when you’re next up in town!’

‘How kind of you, Lady Starmouth! Thank you,’ I said, and at once remembered the Earl’s information that Loretta was due to arrive in London that weekend.

Across the room Lyle was watching us. She had been avoiding me all evening but now she stepped forward impulsively, and as Lady Starmouth turned away from me to respond to a question from the architect, I eased myself around the back of the sofa to a spot out of sight of the terrace where the Bishop was enjoying a stroll with the architect’s good-looking wife.

Lyle reached me a second later. ‘I’m sorry this afternoon ended in a mess,’ she said rapidly. ‘I enjoyed myself up at the Ring. Thanks for the outing.’

So she had decided she was ready for another pounce.

‘Have lunch with me tomorrow.’

‘Oh, that’s quite impossible – the Starmouths are leaving, more guests are arriving and Mrs Jardine will need me all day,’ she said without hesitation, but as she nerved herself to look at me directly I thought her eyes were communicating a very different message. At last she added in a low voice: ‘I’m sorry. It would have been nice. But I can’t.’

‘Don’t worry, I’ll ask you again,’ I said. ‘Bishop or no Bishop.’

For a moment she was motionless. Then she said in her politest voice, ‘Will you please excuse me?’ and slipped away before the Bishop could return to the room to make sure nothing subversive was occurring in his absence.

I was quite unable to sleep that night. I tossed and turned, I read the most boring genealogies of the Old Testament, I dowsed myself with cold water, I prayed, counted sheep and went to the lavatory. Finally at two o’clock I padded downstairs to the Bishop’s library in pursuit of some light reading. Jardine’s taste in literature was a varied one and we had already discovered a shared weakness for detective stories.

Reaching the library I switched on the light and began to prowl around the shelves. I was just thinking that the Bishop’s book collection was less eclectic than I had anticipated when I discovered a shelf devoted to nineteenth-century novels, including a battered group by Sir Walter Scott. I was delighted. The novels of Scott never failed to lull me into a state of somnolence, and pulling out
Ivanhoe
I idly opened the cover.

To my surprise I found myself confronting a much-inscribed fly-leaf. At the top of the page someone had written
INGRID ASHLEY,
1885, and below this signature another hand, bold and upright, had added: ‘My stepmother gave me this book to keep me quiet, but I solemnly swear I shall never read it because I know that novels are the invention of the Devil,
ADAM ALEXANDER JARDINE,
1888 (aged 9).’ But this was not the last entry on the fly-leaf. Further down the page the bold upright hand, now imbued with an elegant maturity had written: ‘My dearest, just look at this inscription which I wrote to protect myself in case Father found a novel in my room! What a pathetic little horror I was and what a wonderful thing you did, introducing me to
Ivanhoe
, to English literature and to civilization. Let me now return this book to its original owner and say: Welcome to Starbridge! All my love always,
ADAM (ADAM ALEXANDER STARO,
1932 – aged 53!)’

A footfall sounded behind me, and as I spun round
Ivanhoe
slipped through my hands to thud upon the floor.

‘Can I help you, Dr Ashworth?’ inquired Jardine in his most sardonic voice. ‘Is there perhaps some information you still require?’

I somehow managed to say, ‘I assure you my espionage has its limits, Bishop. I wasn’t making a secret assault on your journal.’ To hide my confusion I stooped to pick up
Ivanhoe
as I added, ‘I was looking for some light reading to ease the boredom of insomnia.’

‘In that case we’re driven here by a common goal but personally I’m about to fight my own insomnia with a detective story.’ He bent to extract a volume from the bottom shelf. ‘Have you read
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
by the other, more famous Miss Christie?’

‘Yes. That’s the one where one has to watch the narrator.’

‘Precisely. I always find the more I read that story the more intrigued I become by the narrator’s omissions and evasions.’ He glanced at the book in my hands as he added, ‘However perhaps you’re better off with Sir Walter Scott. That volume in particular has sentimental memories for me.’

‘I was just reading the inscription. Your stepmother must have been a remarkable woman, Dr Jardine.’

‘She needed to be remarkable. It’s a catastrophe for any family when the mother dies young, and by the time Ingrid entered our lives we were all deeply disordered … I suppose your own mother didn’t die young, by any chance?’