Scandalous Risks (9 page)

The Bishop was clearly not accustomed to being answered back by a young female who had never even been to a university. Possibly he was unaccustomed to being answered back by anyone. He took a moment to recover from the shock but then said suavely enough: ‘Good point! But perhaps I might draw a parallel here with the legal profession. Banisters and solicitors are all qualified lawyers, but when a knotty legal problem arises the solicitors refer the matter to the banisters, the experts, in order to obtain the best advice.’

‘Well, I’m afraid I must now leave you to your expertise,’ I said politely, rising to my feet, ‘and descend from the mountain top of the South Canonry to the valley of the Deanery.’ I turned to my hostess. °Thanks so much for the tea and sympathy, Mrs Ashworth.’

‘Drop in again soon,’ said my heroine with a smile, ‘and if there’s anything I can do, just let me know.’

‘Yes indeed,’ said the Bishop, suddenly becoming pastoral. ‘If there’s anything we can do –’

‘I’ll see you out, Venetia,’ said his wife, and led the way downstairs to the hall. As she opened the front door she added: ‘You won’t want to lug your suitcases to the Deanery – I’ll ask Charley to bring them over later in the car.’

I thanked her before saying anxiously: ‘I do hope I didn’t upset the Bishop when I answered back.’

‘My dear, he was enthralled! Such a delightful change for him to meet someone who doesn’t treat him
as a
sacred object on a pedestal.’ She looked at me thoughtfully with her cool dark eyes before musing: ‘Maybe you’ve been concentrating on the wrong age-group; very few young men have the self-assurance or the
savoir-faire
to cope with clever women. Try looking for something intelligent, well-educated and pushing forty.’

‘It’ll be either married or peculiar.’

‘Not necessarily ... Didn’t I hear a rumour once that Eddie Hoffenberg was rather smitten with you?’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Mrs Ashworth – I’d rather die a virgin spinster!’

Mrs Ashworth merely smiled her enigmatic smile and said: ‘Do keep in touch.’

I drifted away down the drive towards the Deanery.

V

Eddie Hoffenberg emerged from the Deanery just as I approached the front door, so there was no possibility of avoiding him. My father had once referred to him as Aysgarth’s poodle – that bloody Hun,’ but my father, who had lost his best friends in the First War, was notorious for his anti-German sentiment. Other people, less outspoken than my father, were content to regard Eddie with a polite antipathy. ‘It’s my cross,’ Eddie would say with gloomy relish, and sometimes he would even add: ‘Suffering is good for the soul.’

‘It’s clergymen like Eddie Hoffenberg,’ I had said once to Primrose, ‘who make Christianity look like an exercise in masochism.’

‘It’s Germans like Eddie Hoffenberg,’ said Primrose, ‘who encourage the belief that we were doing them a favour by trying to kill them in the war.’

However although there was no denying that Eddie was a German, he was hardly typical of Hitler’s so-called master race, and the fact that he had eventually acquired British citizenship marked him out as a very unusual German indeed. He was tall, bald and bespectacled; his faintly Semitic cast of features had caused him to be bullied by Aryan monsters in the Nazi army, but since he had no Jewish blood in him, this experience had provided him with additional evidence that he was doomed to special suffering. Fortunately his army career had been brief. In 1944 at the age of twenty he had been captured by the British in Normandy, imported to England and dumped in a prison camp on Starbury Plain. Two weeks later Aysgarth, then Archdeacon of Starbridge, had paid a pastoral visit to the camp and naturally Eddie had been quite unable to resist the opportunity to moan to him about how awful life was.

It was not difficult to understand why Eddie had chosen to adopt Aysgarth as a hero, but it was far harder to understand why Aysgarth had chosen to return Eddie’s devotion. ‘Aysgarth has five sons,’ my father remarked once to my mother. ‘Why should he want to play the father to a Teutonic disaster who’s perpetually encased in gloom?’ My mother had no answer, but Primrose eventually produced an explanation. ‘Eddie changed Father’s life,’ she told me. ‘It was Eddie who wrote to Bishop Bell and said how wonderful Father was with the POWs, and since that letter led to Father’s vital friendship with Bell, Father can’t help being sentimental about Eddie and regarding him as a mascot.’

Eddie came from Dresden, which had been devastated by fire-bombing in 1945. None of his family had survived. After the war he had quickly reached the decision that he had to begin a new life elsewhere, and when he thought of the one friend he still possessed he sought Aysgarth’s help. Aysgarth encouraged him to be a clergyman. Eddie had been a Lutheran once, but that was in the old, vanished life. Once Aysgarth had extracted the necessary money from the new Anglo-German Churchmen’s Fellowship, Eddie began his studies at the Starbridge Theological College and spent his holidays with the Aysgarths in London.

Ordination as a clergyman of the Church of England followed and a curacy was squeezed out of a Westminster parish. (A German was lucky to get any job in Westminster, but the Bishop of London caved in after Aysgarth and Bell staged a joint assault.) When Aysgarth became Dean of Starbridge he at once approached the new bishop on Eddie’s behalf, and Dr Ashworth, striving to exercise a Christian spirit after his own years as a POW, proved unwilling to make any move which could be construed as anti-German. Possibly he also saw the chance of unloading his current diocesan problem, a seedy Starbridge parish in the area of the city known as Langley Bottom where there was a run-down Victorian monster of a church, an equally run-down Victorian monster of a vicarage and a working-class congregation of twenty.

Eddie the masochist embraced this challenge with zest. Having been trained at the Starbridge Theological College in its Ango-Catholic heyday under Nick’s father Jonathan Darrow, he had no hesitation in resorting to the most florid ritualism (traditionally popular among the religious members of the working classes), and before long the parish was rising from the dead. Consolidating his success Eddie slaved on, organising clubs, running Bible classes, raising money. The parishioners, who had at first regarded him with suspicion, came to the conclusion they preferred the attentions of a foreigner, even a German foreigner, to the ministrations of some toffee-nosed English gentleman who had been educated at a public school. (The plebs are such dreadful snobs.) Eddie flourished. The parish boomed. The Bishop was both amazed and admiring. When a residentiary canonry at last fell vacant at the Cathedral, he had no objection to Aysgarth’s suggestion that Eddie’s talents should now be employed in a more elevated sphere, and so Eddie became a canon, working hard at his Chapter duties and beavering away on various diocesan committees. He had arrived. Franz Eduard Hoffenberg, that pathetic young German prisoner of war, had been transformed into a pillar of the English ecclesiastical establishment. All he now had to do was live happily ever after.

Of course being Eddie he remained gloomy but it was impossible for him to dispute that his life was now very comfortable. He had a snug little house in the Close, a surrogate family, the Aysgarths, a reasonable income and a pleasant amount of prestige. No one was surprised when he made a success ofthe canonry. Discarding without difficulty the Anglo-Catholic trappings which he had used to conquer Langley Bottom, he fitted easily into the Cathedral’s middle-of-the-road pattern of worship. In theological matters he was more conservative than his hero, but like Aysgarth he was an idealist prone to talk soppily about the brotherhood of man when he had downed a couple of drinks. His odd, ungainly, pear-shaped figure was always carefully dressed. He observed English customs rigorously, even declaring how devoted he was to Walls’ pork sausages and Dickens when we all knew he must be hankering for
bratwurst
and Goethe. Priding himself on his mastery of slang he spoke English almost flawlessly except when he began to ponder on the mystery of suffering. Those were the occasions when I thought he was a joke. Otherwise I just thought he was a thundering bore.

As we encountered each other outside the Deanery that afternoon I inwardly recoiled but nevertheless achieved a passable smile.

‘Hi Eddie,’ I said and automatically added: ‘How are you?’ but that was a mistake. One never asked Eddie how he was. He was all too likely to reply in excruciating detail.

‘Well,
as a matter
of fact my back’s playing me up again,’ he began, ‘but I’ve found this wonderful osteopath who —’

‘Super! Is the Dean in?’

‘Yes, but we’re just off to evensong. I say, Venetia, I had no idea you were about to visit the Aysgarths!’

‘Ah well, ignorance is bliss,
as
the saying goes ...’ I was trying to edge past him but his bulk was blocking the way. The Deanery, a rambling medieval concoction enhanced by Georgian meddling, had no formal drive up to the front door; instead a pebbled lane at the side of the house led to the old stables, while a flagstone path flanked with lavender bushes led through the front garden. Eddie was planted on the flagstones and I was trying to slink past the lavender.

‘Are you here for long?’ Eddie was enquiring, apparently unaware of my attempts at circumnavigation.

‘No, I’m heading for Oxford.’

The front door swung wide. ‘Venetia!’ cried Aysgarth in delight. ‘What a marvellous surprise!’

‘Mr Dean!’ I said as my spirits soared, and firmly pushing my way past Eddie I clasped Aysgarth’s outstretched hand.

VI

‘Must see you!’ I hissed. ‘Top secret!’

His bright blue eyes at once became brighter and bluer. He loved being conspiratorial with young women. ‘You go on ahead,’ he called to Eddie. ‘I’ll catch you up.’

‘We’re late already, Stephen —’

‘I’ll run all the way to the vestry!’ said Aysgarth lightly, and with reluctance Eddie sloped off through the front gate.

Wasting no time I said: ‘I’ve left home and I need advice. Any chance of a quick word without half the Close breathing down our necks?’

‘Meet me in the cloisters after evensong.’

‘Wonderful! Thanks so much ... In that case I might as well go to evensong, mightn’t I?’

‘Why not?’ said the Dean amused. ‘It would help to pass the time!’

As it occurred to me that Dr Ashworth would have responded far more coolly to my lukewarm attitude to worship I exclaimed: ‘How glad I am you’re not the Bishop! I’ve just been hobnobbing with him at the South Canonry.’

‘How on earth did you end up there?’

‘I got mixed up with Charley on the train. Mr Dean, what do you think of
Honest
to God?
’

‘
Superb! Quite splendid! A breath of fresh air sweeping through the Church of England!’

‘Yes, I thought it probably was. The Bishop’s decided it’s absolutely the bottom.’

The trouble with Charles,’ said Aysgarth as we left the garden, crossed Canonry Drive and entered the churchyard of the Cathedral, ‘is that he was trained
as a
theologian. Such a pity! A theologian’s approach to religion is nearly always much too cerebral and he inevitably becomes cut off from ordinary believers.’

‘But isn’t this book supposed to be bad for ordinary believers?’

‘Rubbish! It’s the best thing that’s happened to them for years. Robinson’s realised that the ordinary believers are waiting for a new comprehensible interpretation of Christianity which will relate to the lives they’re living right now in the 1960s — they’re not waiting for cerebral restatements by theologians in their dead, dry, alienating academic language!’

‘But if the book’s too radical —’

‘Nothing could be too radical! Let’s have this New Reformation Robinson talks about! Let’s have this New Morality! Now that we’re finally emerging from the long shadow of the war and shedding the millstone of the Empire, we need to celebrate our psychological liberation by making everything new — so why not start by flinging religion into the melting-pot, as Robinson suggests, and recasting our beliefs in a bold, creative dynamic style that’s thoroughly attuned to our day and age?’

I began to feel excited — insofar as one can ever feel excited about a subject such as theology. I was, in fact, very much in the mood for revolution and I deeply fancied the thought of an iconoclastic assault on any part of the established order. ‘Long live Bishop John Robinson!’ I declared, making Aysgarth laugh, and we quickened our pace across the sward to the Cathedral.

VII

At the north porch we parted, Aysgarth walking on to the Dean’s door, the special entrance for the clergy, and I wandering through the porch into the nave. A sidesman showed me to a seat in the choir. This was not an unusual favour to bestow prior to a weekday service when few laymen would be present, but nevertheless it made me feel privileged.

The Cathedral was quiet. By that time the tourists had left and it had reverted to the inhabitants of Starbridge, most of whom preferred to admire it loyally from afar. However the congregation did eventually mount to thirty. I sat gazing up at the vaulted ceiling and trying to think noble thoughts, but I was pondering on Mrs Ashworth’s advice about eye make-up when the organ marked the beginning of the service.

I liked the weekday choral evensong. It required no effort apart from kneeling down and standing up at regular intervals, and there was no sermon either to stretch the brain or induce rigor mortis. The choirboys sang in their unearthly voices; the vicars-choral bayed with authority; the vergers marched around providing touches of ceremonial; the clergy lolled meditatively in their stalls. I thought it was all so luxuriously restful, like a hot bath garnished with an expensive perfume, and as I watched the sun slant through the great west window I thought how clever God was to have invented the Church of England, that national monument dedicated to purveying religion in such an exquisitely civilised form.

Aysgarth was looking untidy
as
usual. His shop-soiled white hair always seemed to need trimming. Wearing a dignified expression he rose to his feet to read the lessons, while in the intervals Eddie, crammed into his canon’s stall at the other end of the choir, intoned the versicles and recited the prayers. I was always surprised by how well Eddie did this, but no doubt Aysgarth had trained him not to sound as if he was fathoms deep in depression. Aysgarth himself read the lessons beautifully in his deep, resonant voice. In fact I was so busy thinking how well he read that I forgot to listen to what he was reading. Appalled by my lack of concentration I was on the point of making a new attempt to focus my mind on the service when I saw Nick Darrow staring at me from the opposite side of the choir. I supposed I had been too busy thinking about eye make-up to notice him earlier.

As soon as our glances met he looked away but I went on watching him and wondering if he was destined to be my lucky mascot. But mascot seemed the wrong word to describe someone like Nick. It was too cosy, too banal. For Nick Darrow I needed a word which implied magic, extraordinary happenings, paranormal phenomena ‘Ah-ah-ah-men!’ sang the choir, winding up the service.

The organ trilled and fell silent for a moment before embarking on a fugue. Everyone hauled themselves to their feet. The choir tripped out jauntily, mission accomplished, and the clergy followed, looking inscrutable. Aysgarth never once glanced in my direction.

Wandering towards the transept I found Nick had fallen into step beside me.

‘Ah!’ I said, finally grasping the word I wanted. ‘It’s my Talisman! I shouldn’t be surprised to see you again, should I, but why are you on your own?’

‘Charley’s busy with his father.’

‘Mrs Ashworth was telling me about yours. I hear he’s very old.’

‘Yes, but he’s okay.’

‘How old is "old" exactly?’

‘He’ll be eighty-three in May. But he’s okay.’

‘
Campos mentis?

‘
Yep.’

‘Super! I often think my father’s mad as a hatter. Is your father able to do much?’

‘Yep. He prays.’

‘Ah. All the time?’

‘No, he does see people occasionally.’

‘He sounds like a hermit!’

‘He is a hermit. But he doesn’t mind me being with him because we don’t have to talk.’

I suddenly realised I was gazing at him as if he were a creature from another planet. ‘How restful!’ I said, not sure what to say. ‘My father’s the very reverse of a silent hermit!’

‘He might become one later. My father only became a recluse after my mother died.’ He turned abruptly towards the nave. ‘So long.’

‘When are we due to meet again?’

He shrugged and walked away.

I gazed after him in fascination. Then heaving open the massive door in the south transept I passed at last into the cloisters.

VIII In the centre of the quadrangle lay the lawn beneath which in previous centuries the eminent men of Starbridge had been buried, and overshadowing this ancient graveyard an enormous cedar tree towered above the roof of the colonnade. There was a faint breeze. The cedar’s dark upper branches were stirring against the pale, limpid sky.

I was still gazing at this tranquil scene when the door creaked behind me and Aysgarth slipped out of the transept. Unlike Dr Ashworth he had entirely rejected the archaic uniform of a senior churchman, but perhaps that was less because he wanted to be modern than because his thickset figure was unsuited to fancy dress. On that evening he was wearing a black suit, slightly crumpled, and the black clerical ‘stock’ which was worn over an ordinary shirt and secured by ties at the back beneath the jacket. He had no pectoral cross; he belonged to the generation of Protestant churchmen who thought such papist adornment pardonable only when adopted by bishops. His hair, perhaps disarranged when he had removed his surplice after the service, swooped wildly over his ears in undisciplined wings and bumped against the back of his stiff white clerical collar. He looked like an eccentric scientist who has just made an important discovery.

‘Let’s go and sit on Lady Mary Calthrop-Ponsonby!’ he suggested blithely as I moved to meet him.

‘I
beg
your pardon, Mr Dean?’

With a laugh he led the way to a wooden seat on the northwestern corner of the lawn, and as I drew closer I saw that the back of the seat bore a brass plaque inscribed: ‘In memory of Lady Mary Calthrop-Ponsonby, lath February 1857-8th November 1941. "FIGHT THE GOOD FIGHT WITH ALL THY MIGHT.’

‘Three cheers for Lady Mary,’ I said as we sat down, and told him how I had decided to abandon London in search of a new life. ‘... and I’ve now reached the point where I’m trying to decide what to do next,’ I concluded. ‘Mrs Ashworth thinks I should go to Oxford, park myself on Christian and Katie and wangle my way into their set, but I’m not sure I have the nerve to exploit them so brazenly.’

‘I don’t see why you shouldn’t stay with Christian and Katie for a few days while you decide if Oxford has anything to offer you, but I can’t quite see why Lyle is pointing you in that direction.’

‘She thinks I’d enjoy mixing with an intellectual jeunesse
dorée.
’

‘
On the contrary I think you’d soon be bored stiff with all those academics.’

‘Would I? Are you sure? I just feel that if only I could get in with the right set –’

‘In my experience right sets tend to be much too fast.’

‘When one’s been crawling along like a tortoise, Mr Dean, the idea of pace begins to seem attractive.’

He laughed. ‘Was London really that bad?’

‘Yes, it really was. I’ve been a failure there. Don’t just tell me to go back and try again.’

‘Very well, let’s be more imaginative. This could be a great opportunity for you, Venetia! A fresh start is always a great opportunity, but you should remember that happiness isn’t ultimately dependent on getting in with the right set; it’s about serving God by using your God-given gifts in the best possible way.’

‘I only seem to have a God-given gift for drifting in and out of boring jobs.’

‘It’s obvious that you haven’t yet found your métier, and in my opinion pondering on the right métier, not choosing which city to live in, should actually be your number one concern at the moment. You need to escape to somewhere very quiet and very remote for a few days so that you can ponder in peace and see your situation in perspective ... Come on holiday with me after Easter!’

I nearly fell off Lady Mary. ‘What a breathtaking suggestion!’

He laughed again before adding: ‘Dido’s not coming but Eddie’s accompanying me and Primrose is joining us twenty-four hours later. Come up on the Wednesday after Easter with Primrose!’

‘Where’s "up"?’

‘The Outer Hebrides.’

‘
Is
there an Outer Hebrides?’

‘Apparently. The new Earl of Starmouth has very kindly lent me his hunting-lodge on Harris.’

‘Don’t Elizabeth and Pip want to go?’

‘Dido’s taking them to her sister in Leicestershire where they’ll ride horses with her and be blissfully happy.’

‘
Chacun à son goût,
’
I said. ‘Personally I’d rather live
it
up in a Caledonian Shangri-La.’

‘My sentiments exactly!’ said Aysgarth, and
as
he smiled I suddenly wondered if he, like me, was seizing the chance to escape from intractable private problems.