Glittering Images (22 page)

‘Oh, I see,’ said the Bishop blankly.

I stepped closer to them. ‘Should we take her the sacrament, Bishop?’

‘No, a state of frailty is hardly the equivalent of a state of prostration,’ said the Bishop severely, and at once I sensed he disapproved of the reserved sacrament in all but the most extreme cases. As we moved outside I murmured, ‘I suppose you’re a long way from favouring perpetual reservation, Bishop.’

‘Perpetual reservation? Certainly not! I’ll have no Popish practices here!’ declared the Bishop, and as I realized he was probably behaving exactly like his Nonconformist father I thought what a mysterious force heredity was, spreading like a stain across the texture of the personality.

We returned in silence to the palace.

Lyle missed breakfast but appeared later as we all gathered in the hall to go to Matins.

‘I’m all right now,’ she said in response to the Bishop’s abrupt inquiry. ‘It was just a passing malaise.’ And when she smiled at me I knew she was anxious to conceal the new tension in our relationship. ‘Thanks again for last night, Charles.’

I said, ‘I was worried in case the dinner had disagreed with you.’

‘I admit those heavenly mushrooms gave me some interesting dreams!’

‘I had some interesting dreams too,’ I said, keeping an eye on the Bishop who seemed to be abnormally restless. ‘Remind me to tell you about them sometime.’

‘Are we all ready?’ said the Bishop irritably, ‘or am I to deliver my sermon by a series of stentorian shouts from the palace doorstep?’

We set off once more to the Cathedral.

I had been hoping for a first-class sermon and Jardine did not disappoint me. His text was ‘For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?’ and as I watched, knowing he had written out every word even though he often gave the impression of speaking off the cuff, I admired him for keeping his God-given talent on such a tightly disciplined rein.

The sermon, perfectly constructed, immaculately delivered, unfolded itself like a complex flower opening its petals before the sun. I always found it arresting to see an expert in any field doing his work well, and Jardine was an expert in homiletics, selecting his intellectual strands sparingly but weaving them with stark skill into a rapier-sharp exposition of Christian teaching. Finally, reaching his peroration, he knotted the intellectual strands into a single dazzling sentence, heightened the power of his delivery and drove home his message with the full force of his oratorical sledgehammer.

I thought, I’ll give up my ivory tower. I’ll go to Africa as a missionary. Or I’ll become a slum-priest.

Then I knew I had been hypnotized by those lambent amber eyes.

On my knees during the blessing I found my thoughts were becoming more rational but remaining revolutionary. I was telling myself that instead of passing the remainder of the Long Vacation at Laud’s while I worked on my new book I should instead offer to do a locum so that some overworked country parson could have a holiday. But then the sinner’s thought entered my head; the parish experience would look well on my curriculum vitae, and I despised myself.

During the silence following the blessing I prayed urgently: deliver me from temptation; show me the way; let thy will, not mine, be done.

Then the organist launched into a final toccata, and rising to my feet I began to wonder anew about Lyle.

Later as we all assembled in the palace drawing-room prior to the midday Sunday dinner, I congratulated the Bishop on his sermon and added on an impulse, ‘I was hoping to visit a clergyman in your diocese before I left Starbridge, but it turns out he’s away on holiday. His name’s Philip Wetherall and he’s an old friend of mine.’

‘Wetherall,’ said the Bishop. ‘Ah yes. The parish of Starrington Magna. An excellent wife, two well-behaved small children and a very vocal infant.’

‘I haven’t met the offspring but the wife’s splendid, I agree, and Philip himself is so hard-working and conscientious that I was most relieved to hear he was finally having a holiday.’ I had no intention of saying more but the other half of my personality evidently felt there was more to be said. Rapidly I murmured, ‘I feel guilty about my privileged ministry sometimes.’

Jardine regarded me without expression. When he made no immediate reply I thought he might be considering my intercession an impertinence and my guilt an affectation but suddenly he said: ‘I assure you Wetherall hasn’t escaped either the eagle eye of my Archdeacon or my own keen interest. But I’m glad you spoke up for your friend, Dr Ashworth; I’m glad to know you’re not solely preoccupied with the seamy side of Church politics.’

I managed to say: ‘It was a great sermon. It made me think. I want to change course, but … not so easy … sort of trapped … not sure I fully understand –’

‘Go to your bishop,’ said Jardine. ‘Ask him to help you find a new spiritual director in the Cambridge area. And do it soon.’

The butler announced that dinner was served. Across the room the Colonel was finishing his pink gin and Mrs Cobden-Smith was declaring that refrigerators ran more efficiently on electricity than on gas and Mrs Jardine was telling her cousins what wonderful servants she had at the palace and Lyle was glancing at her watch and everyone was rising to their feet.

‘But I don’t want to go to my bishop,’ my voice said to Jardine. ‘I don’t want him thinking I’m in any sort of muddle – and anyway I’m fine, everything’s fine, there’s absolutely no need to bother my bishop, no need at all.’

‘Come along, Alex!’ called Mrs Cobden-Smith. ‘The meal will get cold if we have to wait for you to say grace!’

Jardine ignored her. He said in a voice which would have been inaudible to the other people in the room, ‘The Fordite monks have a house in my diocese, as I’m sure you know. I’ll have a word with the Abbot and ask him to recommend their best counsellor at Grantchester.’

‘That’s very good of you, Bishop, but –’

‘No buts. You absolutely must have proper counselling. Now let’s make a speedy move to the table before Amy starts complaining about cold soup.’

I followed him in silence to the dining-room.

I left the palace an hour later. After the round of farewells had been smoothly accomplished and the words of gratitude warmly expressed to my hosts all I said to Lyle in the porch was, ‘I’ll be back.’

Glancing into the driving-mirror for a final view of the palace I saw she was still standing where I had left her, a small tense figure, enigmatic to the last, disturbingly alone.

When I reached London some time later, I steered my way through the stifling streets to my club in St James’s where I reserved a room for the night. Then leaving my car parked nearby I walked the short distance to the Starmouths’ house in Curzon Street.

I was now more determined than ever to see Loretta Staviski in my quest for the evidence which would allow me to think the unthinkable. Rationally I still could not believe that Jardine had fallen into a gross moral error either with her or with anyone else, but I was beyond mere reason. I had sensed the bizarre in Lyle’s distress the previous night, the inexplicable in her absence from Communion, the weird in the Bishop’s attempt to gloss over her depression at the time of the Coronation and the sinister in his irritability as she and I had exchanged light-hearted remarks before Matins. I was now convinced that some very odd situation indeed existed at the palace at Starbridge, and although the mystery appeared increasingly intractable this only made me more determined to solve it. Taking a deep breath I sallied up the steps to the black front door of the Starmouths’ tall cream-coloured house and rang the bell.

However I was destined to be disappointed; Lord and Lady Starmouth, I was told, had departed with their guest for their country home and were not expected back in London until the following Thursday. Retiring to my club I plotted an assault on Leatherhead, read the evening office and supped well off cold mutton and claret.

Starmouth Court, slumbering in seclusion on its wooded hillside, overlooked a stretch of the Mole Valley which was attractively pastoral. Fields framed the watermeadows by the river, and beyond the fields the hills climbed steeply to give the landscape its balance and grace. It was hard to believe, as I approached the house on the morning after my arrival in London, that I was less than twenty miles from my club in the heart of the West End.

I showed my card to the keeper at the lodge, and when he opened the gates I drove up the steep winding drive. I was intrigued to see the house at close quarters after so many years of distant glimpses; the Queen Anne mansion was handsome, serene and well-preserved, like a wealthy dowager who had lived an uneventful life. Having parked the car I looked back towards the valley but the trees hid the view at ground level and the atmosphere of seclusion was heightened.

A modest young footman opened the door, and after introducing myself I asked for Lady Starmouth.

‘I’m sorry, sir,’ came the response, ‘but Lady Starmouth went into Leatherhead this morning and she isn’t expected back until lunchtime.’

I suddenly knew fortune was going to favour me.

‘Then perhaps,’ I said, ‘I could see Professor Staviski if she’s at home.’

‘I’ll inquire, sir. Please come in.’

He took my card and showed me into a small morning-room which faced the drive. I waited. For a long time nothing happened, and I was just wondering if the Professor had gone into hiding in order to preserve her guilty secret when high heels tapped across the hall, the door opened abruptly and at last I saw the woman who had proved such a pastoral disaster for Jardine.

‘I was much interested and not a little surprised at her confidence, lack of reticence, and complete detachment from conventional sex-morality …’

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

I had forgotten Lady Starmouth’s estimate that Loretta was not much older than I was. I had been expecting a woman in her early fifties, a contemporary of Lady Starmouth and Mrs Jardine, so it came as a considerable surprise when I found myself confronted by a woman barely past forty who looked younger; evidently the disastrous husband had been acquired in her teens. I had also been expecting someone plain, partly because of Lady Starmouth’s remark that Loretta failed to conform to fashionable standards of beauty and partly because Jardine had portrayed her as a woman lacking in self-esteem, but this woman was smart, well groomed, striking. She had dark hair, swept smoothly into a knot on top of her head, a suntanned complexion and an hourglass figure which I immediately noted and fancied. Behind her stylish glasses her eyes were a vivid blue.

She looked me up and down with that unabashed curiosity which I had found before in American women oblivious of English constraint, and I sensed that she too was noting what she saw and fancying it. I smiled. She smiled back, and at once I knew we had travelled a long way before a word had been spoken.

‘Dr Ashworth?’ she said in a slightly husky voice as she held out her hand. ‘What a coincidence! Evelyn’s been telling me all about you.’

This hardly surprised me; Lady Starmouth would have been quick to inform her that someone was taking much too keen an interest in that old friendship with Jardine, but as far as I could tell Loretta seemed quite unconcerned by my questionable invasion of her privacy.

‘How do you do, Professor,’ I began formally, but she immediately set all formality aside.

‘Call me Loretta,’ she said. ‘Everyone else over here does. Can I call you Charles or will you think I’m a scarlet woman out to vamp you?’

After the straitlaced atmosphere of Starbridge this was heady stuff indeed. ‘Please do call me Charles,’ I said, ‘and if you want to vamp me I’m sure I can give you the appropriate pastoral attention.’

She laughed. ‘That’s pretty good,’ she said, ‘for an Englishman. Well, Charles – is it too early for a drink? Yes, I guess it is. But how about some coffee?’

We decided there was nothing wrong with drinking coffee at eleven o’clock in the morning. The servant was summoned, the order given and in response to my polite inquiry about her journey Loretta began to talk about her voyage across the Atlantic. I was soon so intrigued by her story about a Roman Catholic priest whom she had taught to dance the Black Bottom that I almost forgot to inquire after Lady Starmouth.

‘She’s calling on the local vicar,’ said Loretta, lighting a cigarette, ‘but I didn’t feel in the mood for inspecting some dusty exhibit in Evelyn’s clerical collection – with the result that here I am, entertaining the Archbishop of Canterbury’s private eye!’

‘And of course you’re thinking my visit’s the most monstrous piece of impertinence –’

‘Not in the least! I’m enthralled … Sorry, I should have offered you a cigarette – do you smoke?’

‘Not in my clerical collar.’

‘Maybe I should start wearing a clerical collar – I smoke far too much … Ah, here’s the coffee.’ Our conversation was briefly suspended, but as soon as the servant had gone she added amused, ‘Does old Lang truly think my infatuation with the local vicar twenty years ago could rock the Church of England?’