Glittering Images (19 page)

‘Oh, she didn’t keep her looks. Shortly before I moved to Mayfair she put on weight – thyroid trouble – and became rather withdrawn but I never cared what she looked like. I said to her once, “Whether you’re six stone or sixteen stone you’ll still be Ingrid”, and she said, “Whether you’re nine or ninety you’ll still be Adam”. Nobody calls me Adam any more,’ said the Bishop, replacing the photograph in its envelope, ‘but that doesn’t mean Adam no longer exists. I sometimes think that having two names is like having a split personality. Alex is the Bishop, the famous man in public life –’

‘The glittering image,’ I said.

‘– but beyond Alex there’s Adam, still staggering around beneath the burden of that difficult past, still haunted by so many fearful memories, still battling with that filial guilt which can never be completely assuaged –’

‘Sometimes I too feel as if I’ve got a split personality,’ I said, ‘but my other self doesn’t have a separate name.’

Understanding flared in Jardine’s eyes. He said abruptly, ‘Cut yourself loose from Lang and give your other self room to breathe. Being His Grace’s lackey is doing you absolutely no good at all.’ He did not wait for a reply but moved to the door with his detective story in his hand. ‘I suggest we now make renewed assaults on our insomnia,’ he added over his shoulder. ‘I apologize for detaining you so long with my unsolicited bedtime story.’

‘I’ve no complaints, Bishop. Quite the reverse. Thank you again.’

We retired in silence to our bedrooms.

I thought of that bearded Victorian version of Jardine with the sultry young woman who had restored order to a chaotic household. Then I thought of that woman, middle-aged but possibly still sultry, leaving her husband to keep house for the stepson twenty years her junior, the stepson who could not afford to marry.

‘She said, “It was worth it all for Adam”,’ I could hear Lyle murmuring in my memory.

‘He really is the most wonderful man, believe me,’ said the young chaplain, Gerald Harvey, as I slipped over the edge of consciousness and my mind was released from all constraint.

‘You don’t give much away, do you?’ said Lyle to me in a vast church as we waited in vain for the Bishop to marry us. ‘You’re the real mystery here.’

‘Karl Barth has solved the mystery of the historical Jesus,’ said Jardine to me as we stood in the centre of Starbury Ring. ‘He says you have to watch the narrator in
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.
’

‘I’m so glad I found you, Dr Ashworth,’ said Mrs Jardine, the present Mrs Jardine, smiling up at me as we stood by the river at the bottom of the garden, ‘because I wanted to tell you that I’ve found out who killed Roger Ackroyd. It was Mr A. P. Herbert. Isn’t it wonderful that Our Lord’s approved of the A. P. Herbert Bill? Divorce is always so interesting, isn’t it, especially in hot weather.’

‘Loretta was divorced,’ said the Earl to me over his shoulder as he landed a huge fish. ‘Of course she’d been Jardine’s mistress for years.’

‘No, no, no, Henry!’ exclaimed Lady Starmouth who was swimming naked in the river. ‘She was never Alex’s mistress! He always behaved with propriety!’

‘That’s what
you
say, Lady Starmouth!’ said Mrs Cobden-Smith, appearing with the St Bernard. ‘But why should we believe you?’

‘I’ll tell you what I believe,’ said Lady Starmouth, climbing out of the river and revealing a pair of intriguingly spherical breasts. ‘I believe Dr Ashworth wants to go to bed with me.’

‘I’m so sorry, Lady Starmouth,’ I said, ‘but I’m afraid I can’t. I’m waiting to go to bed with Loretta.’

‘I’m your passport to Loretta,’ said Lady Starmouth, dressed in a white ballgown as she led me out of the mortuary where my wife lay dead. ‘But I shan’t introduce you unless you go to bed with me first.’

Lyle said behind me, ‘I really do want to go to bed with you. But I’m afraid of the Bishop.’

‘Did you go to bed with the Bishop?’ I said to the sultry Swedish girl who was waiting for me at the end of a dark corridor, but she said, ‘I have to take you to church because I’m such a deeply religious woman.’

‘Charles is so religious,’ said my mother, who was playing bridge in the nave as Ingrid and I walked into Starbridge Cathedral, ‘but despite that he’s tremendously successful. His father’s so proud of him.’

‘I never usually talk about my father,’ said Jardine as he mounted the steps to the pulpit. ‘My family was deeply disordered.’

‘We’re such a wonderfully happy family!’ said my mother, laughing as she dealt the cards. ‘We never exchange a single cross word!’

‘You bloody young fool!’ cried my father as he broke down the door and burst into the nave.

‘I am not come to call the righteous,’ said Jardine from the pulpit, ‘but sinners to repentance.’

‘You narrow-minded bastard!’ I shouted at my father.

‘I am not come to call the
righteous
,’ proclaimed Jardine in a louder voice, ‘but
sinners
to
repentance
.’

‘No, Charles, no!’ screamed my mother.

‘
I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance!’
bawled the Bishop.

‘You’ll never make a clergyman!’ yelled my father at me. ‘Who the devil do you think you’re fooling?’

‘I AM NOT COME TO CALL THE RIGHTEOUS, BUT SINNEERS – SINNERS – SINNERS –’

‘Father!’ I shouted, sitting bolt upright in bed with the sweat streaming down my face. ‘
Father!
FATHER
–’

Silence fell.

The bedroom was very dark. With a shaking hand I switched on the light. Then I slid out of bed on to my knees and began to pray.

The Starmouths departed after breakfast the next morning and after we had waved goodbye I asked the Bishop if he could spare the time later for a word in private.

‘Of course,’ he said, ‘but it had better be now before I start work on my sermon.’

‘You’re preaching on Sunday?’

‘At Matins, yes. I’m standing in for the Dean who’s been called away to the north to conduct a cousin’s funeral. Are you going to extend your visit to assist me at early Communion?’

I was considerably surprised. ‘I’m sure,’ I said, ‘that you’d prefer to withdraw that invitation you made in your letter, Bishop.’

‘I can’t think why. I’m a Christian, Dr Ashworth, not a heathen politician anxious to blackball you from some exclusive club! Reconsider the invitation and let me know your decision later,’ he said, and as we entered his library he changed the subject by adding with a smile: ‘I trust I vanquished your insomnia last night!’

‘I’m glad to say I was asleep within ten minutes.’ I paused before saying with care, ‘You were very frank with me then and now I’m going to be very frank with you. I suspect the Archbishop may well be pursuing a personal vendetta, but he never actually commissioned me to find the evidence which would cut your throat and even if I did find it I’d never give it to him. I don’t believe cutting throats should be part of my clerical duties. Nor do I believe that a bishop of your calibre deserves to be smeared by the press just because Lang made an exceptionally pompous exhibition of himself over the Abdication. Can you believe me when I say I’m entirely on your side? And if you believe me will you allow me to ask a very impertinent question in order to confirm that you’re absolutely impregnable from scandal?’

‘Well, you’re obviously working yourself up to some truly monstrous piece of impudence, Dr Ashworth, but luckily for you I’m beginning to find your impudence entertaining. What’s the question?’

‘Is there any communication at present between you and Professor Loretta Staviski?’

‘Your treatment of women is a matter of the utmost concern.’

More Letters of Herbert Hensley Henson
Bishop of Durham 1920–1939
ed.
E. F. BRALEY.

Thanks to my elaborate warning Jardine took this new assault on his privacy remarkably well; perhaps, since Lady Starmouth had obviously reported to him every detail of my interrogation, he had even been expecting a question about Loretta. Showing neither surprise nor anger he merely heaved a sigh of resignation.

‘My dear Canon, I’m touched by your zeal on my behalf,’ he said drily, ‘and I hardly like to sound ungrateful since you’ve been so generous as to assure me of your unqualified support, but isn’t your zeal becoming a trifle excessive?’

‘Not when one considers that the professor is arriving in England soon and that any Sunday rag in search of scandal is quite capable of having you watched. If you were to meet Professor Staviski in London –’

‘I shan’t. I haven’t communicated with her for nineteen years, and anyway even back in 1918 there was no scandal. All that happened was that one of my parishioners fell in love with me and I was fool enough not to realize it for some time.’

‘Bishop, may I just ask how many people knew about this incident?’

‘Only Lady Starmouth.’

‘But are you saying,’ I said astonished, ‘that no one else knew – no one else at all? What about your wife?’

‘She was away from home when my friendship with Mrs Staviski reached its unfortunate end. Our child had been born dead, the doctor had recommended country air for Carrie and she was spending a month with her parents.’

‘But did no one suspect what had happened? After all, you could hardly have been living in a vacuum in Mayfair!’

‘Obviously the essence of the incident’s eluded you. Mrs Staviski was flawlessly concealing her true feelings and I merely regarded her as another good friend like Lady Starmouth. Neither of us was generating gossip.’

‘But wasn’t your wife surprised when Mrs Staviski suddenly vanished from Mayfair?’

‘Yes, but it was wartime and a lot of people were coming and going. Also my wife was far from well and too preoccupied with her own troubles to pay much attention to the troubles of others. That was why I never confided in her, of course. It would have been selfish to add to her burdens at that time.’

‘How did Lady Starmouth find out?’

Jardine paused, considering the question. Then he said abruptly, ‘I’ll tell you exactly what happened. Bearing in mind all the circumstances I see no point in keeping you in the dark, and as a clergyman you might even find it instructive to see where I went wrong. This is not a story of moral failure, Dr Ashworth, but of extreme pastoral inadequacy – in other words, this is where we look beyond Alex the Bishop’s “glittering image”, as you put it last night, and see poor old Adam, struggling to be a good vicar and really making a very great hash of it indeed …’

‘It was surprising how many people called her by her Christian name,’ said Jardine. ‘I could never make up my mind whether it was because she was a foreigner and thus outside the English social structure with all its petty conventions, or whether it was because the xenophobic British merely balked at the alien surname. However as a clergyman bound hand and foot by the proprieties, I always called her Mrs Staviski until the day our friendship ended. If I call her Loretta now it’s not because I was accustomed to do so at the time but because “Professor Staviski” (as she now is) makes her sound like some mad disciple of the Russian Revolution.

‘I met her in 1917 when she left her husband and Lady Starmouth enlisted my help. I quickly realized that the marriage had broken down beyond hope of repair – the husband was homosexual – so I decided my duty as a pastor lay not in trying to preserve the marriage but in trying to salvage Loretta, who had been treated so abominably that her self-confidence had been wrecked. Her husband had made her feel she was an object of revulsion to the opposite sex, and I concluded that if she were ever to be restored to a normal life some other man had to repair the damage which had been done. This, I think, was a perfectly rational conclusion but the trouble was that I then elected myself to do the repairs.

‘Yes, you may well look at me with amazement, but I wasn’t quite so stupid as this statement may lead you to believe. I only met her at Lady Starmouth’s house – or at my own in the presence of my wife – and even when Loretta acquired a flat I never went there without a curate in attendance. I had three curates, and I’d learnt always to take one with me when I paid pastoral calls on lonely ladies in Mayfair.

‘But of course I was making a big mistake. I should have realized Loretta wasn’t stable enough to cope with platonic friendship. Men and women aren’t, after all, intended by God for asexual intimacies and in fact there’s a sexual element in all my three long-standing platonic friendships, but the point about Lady Starmouth, Lady Markhampton and Mrs Welbeck is that they’re all married, well balanced and happy; their friendship with me is essentially just a decoration on an already satisfying cake. But with Loretta I wasn’t merely a decoration. I was the icing, the marzipan, the currants, the raisins – everything. She was a foreigner in London, her separation from her husband cut her off from many people who might have befriended her and she was very much alone. Did I allow for her extreme vulnerability? No, I did not. I called on her more often than I should have done; in an effort to divert her from her troubles I lent her numerous books – but all novels, nothing of spiritual value – and in an effort to restore her self-esteem I paid her numerous compliments. Naturally such folly could have only one conclusion.