II
My Mr Dean had been christened Norman Neville and during the course of his career he had possessed various clerical titles, but I shall refer to him throughout this narrative by his surname, Aysgarth, because it was the one designation which never changed. He had left the name Norman behind in infancy when his mother decided to call him Neville, and he had left the name Neville behind in the 1940s when his ghastly second wife insisted on addressing him as Stephen; she had declared that the name Neville had been ruined by the unfortunate Mr Chamberlain, and that only a pure, noble, serious name such as Stephen could ever be good enough for the man she intended to marry. It had apparently never occurred to her that these dreary adjectives hardly did her husband justice, but Aysgarth, whose tolerance of his wife’s peculiarities bordered on the masochistic, had raised no objection to this despotic rechristening, and after his second marriage in 1945 the number of people who knew him as Neville had steadily declined.
‘If any woman tried to alter my name I’d put her in her place pretty damned quickly, I assure you!’ my father declared once to my mother when I was growing up, although in fact Aysgarth’s Christian name was irrelevant to him. My father was old-fashioned enough to call all men outside our family by their surnames, so although he and Aysgarth were close friends the relationship sounded more formal than it was. For years after their first meeting Aysgarth had addressed my father as ‘my Lord’ or ‘Lord Flaxton’, but in 1957 after Aysgarth received his great preferment my father had said to him: ‘Time to dispense with the title – address me as Flaxton in future.’ This invitation, so condescendingly delivered, was intended – and received – as a compliment. Indeed Aysgarth, who was the son of a failed Yorkshire draper, was so overcome that he blushed like a schoolboy.
‘Dear Mr Aysgarth!’ mused my mother long ago in the 1940s when I was still a child. ‘Not quite a gentleman, of course, but
such a
charming way with him at dinner-parties!’
My father and I first met Aysgarth on the same day in 1946. I was nine, my father was fifty-five and Aysgarth, then the Archdeacon of Starbridge, was forty-four. I had been sent home early from school after throwing an inkpot at some detestable girl who had called my father a ‘barmy peer’. I hated this local hell-hole and longed for a governess, but my father, whose idealism forced him to subscribe to the view that patricians should make efforts to mix with the plebeians, was resolute in sending all his daughters to school. The schools were private; my mother would certainly have balked at the prospect of her daughters being sacrificed on the altar of state education, so I never met the so-called ‘lower orders’, only the infamous middle classes who, I quickly learnt, considered it their mission in life to ‘take snooty, la-di-da pigs down a peg or two.’ If the middle classes hadn’t been so busy conquering the world for England in the nineteenth century I doubt if the upper classes would have survived into the twentieth.
‘You did quite right to throw the inkpot!’ said my father after I had defended my behaviour by telling him how he had been abused. ‘One can’t take insults lying down – I’ve no patience with Christians who waffle on about turning the other cheek!’
‘And talking of Christians,’ said my mother before my father could give his well-worn performance as an agnostic lion rampant, ‘don’t forget the Archdeacon’s calling on you this afternoon.’
‘What’s an archdeacon?’ I said, delighted that my father had supported me over the inkpot and anxious to retain his attention.
‘Look it up in the dictionary.’ He glanced at his watch, set me firmly aside and walked out.
I was skulking sulkily in the hall five minutes later when the doorbell rang and I decided to play the butler. I opened the front door. In the porch stood a short, broad-shouldered man who was dressed in a uniform which suggested an eccentric chauffeur. He had brown hair, rather bushy, and the kind of alert expression which one so often sees on the faces of gun-dogs. His eyes were a vivid blue.
‘All chauffeurs should go to the back entrance,’ I said, speaking grandly to conceal how unnerved I was by this curious apparition in gaiters.
‘I’m not a chauffeur – I’m an archdeacon,’ he said smiling at me, and asked my name. To put him to the test I answered poker-faced: ‘Vanilla,’ but he surmounted the challenge with ease. ‘How very charming and original!’ he exclaimed, not batting an eyelid, and told me I reminded him of Alice in Wonderland.
I was hardly able to believe that any adult could be so agreeable. ‘If I’m Alice,’ I said, testing him again to make sure I was not mistaken, ‘who are you?’
‘If you’re Alice, I think I’d like to be Lewis Carroll,’ said my future Mr Dean, exuding the charm which was to win my mother’s approval, and that was the moment when I knew for certain that he was my favourite kind of person, bright and sharp, quick and tough, yet kind enough to have time for a plain little girl with ink-stained fingers and an insufferable air of grandeur.
My father’s reaction to Aysgarth was startlingly similar to mine. ‘I like that man,’ he kept saying afterwards. ‘I
like
him.’ He sounded amazed. Hitherto he had regarded all clergymen as the victims of an intellectual aberration.
‘You’ll never believe this,’ said my mother that evening on the telephone to my elder brother in London, ‘but your father’s fallen violently in love with a clergyman — no, not the local parson who’s gone round the bend! Your father complained about the parson to the Bishop, and the Bishop sent the Archdeacon to investigate, and it’s the
Archdeacon
who’s won your father’s heart. Your father’s even saying he’s seen the Virgin Birth in a new light — he’s dreadfully unsettled, poor dear.’
This evidently alarmed my brother very much. Outraged squawks emerged from the telephone.
However the truth was that my father was neither suffering from the onset of senility nor undergoing a religious conversion. He was merely having to upgrade his opinion of clergymen because Aysgarth, an Oxford graduate, was one of those rare beings, my father’s intellectual equal. A clergyman who had won a first in theology could be dismissed; theology was not a subject which my father took seriously. But a clergyman who had been at Balliol, my father’s own college, and taken a first in Greats, that Olympian academic prize which even my father had had to toil to achieve — there indeed was a clergyman who defied dismissal.
‘I’ve come to the conclusion that Mr Aysgarth’s a great blessing,’ said my mother to me later. ‘Clever men like your papa become bored if they don’t have other clever men to talk to, so perhaps now he’s discovered Mr Aysgarth he won’t be such a crosspatch whenever he’s obliged to leave London and spend time at Flaxton Hall.’
I said: ‘If I read Greats up at Oxford, would Papa like me better?’
‘Darling, what a thing to say! Papa adores you — look how he stood up for you about the inkpot! Papa and I love all our children,’ said my mother vaguely, wandering away from me to attend to her plants in the conservatory, ‘and you’re a very lucky little girl to belong to such a happy family.’
I stood alone, staring after her, and wished I could be one of the exotic plants to which she paid so much devoted attention.
III
Aysgarth had a brother, who taught classics at a minor public school in Sussex, and a sister, who lived in the south London suburbs, but these siblings were rarely mentioned; he was fond of them but they had no place in the world he had carved out for himself since he had entered the Church. He had decided to be a clergyman when he was up at Oxford on his scholarship. This had been a brave decision, since he had had no money and no influential clerical connections, but Aysgarth was capable of great daring and possessed the iron nerves of a successful gambler.
Aysgarth may look the soul of propriety in his clerical uniform,’ my father remarked once to my mother, ‘but by God, he takes scandalous risks!’ My father often talked riskily, particularly when he succumbed to the childish urge to shock people he disliked, but in fact he lived a very conventional life for a man of his class. If he had been Aysgarth, obliged to make his own way in the world, he would have played safe, using the Oxford scholarship to follow an academic career. To enter the Church, where salaries were risible and worldly success for any self-made man was unlikely, would have struck my father as being reckless to the point of lunacy. Outwardly opposed to Christianity but inwardly attracted to the aspects which coincided with his own old-fashioned, sentimental liberal humanism, he was enthralled by the madcap idealism which seemed to him to characterise Aysgarth’s choice of a profession.
‘It was such a courageous step to take, Aysgarth!’
‘Nonsense! God called me to serve Him in the Church, so that was that. One doesn’t argue with God.’
‘But your intellect — surely you were obliged to give rational consideration to —’
‘What could be more rational than the decision to use my gifts in a way which would most clearly manifest my moral and intellectual convictions?’
My father was silent. Unable to risk believing in knowledge which his arrogant intellect deemed unknowable, he was speechless when confronted by Aysgarth’s act of faith. No rhetoric from an evangelist could have dented my father’s agnosticism, but
.
Aysgarth, never speaking of Christianity unless my father raised the subject, presented the most powerful apologetic merely by revealing his life story. My father was baffled but respectful, disapproving yet filled with admiration.
‘But how did you have the nerve to marry when you were still a curate? Wasn’t that an absolutely scandalous risk for a penniless young man to take?’
‘I’d been engaged for seven years – wouldn’t it have been even more of a scandalous risk if I’d waited a day longer?’ retorted Aysgarth, and added to my mother as if he knew he could rely on her sympathy: ‘I regarded my first wife as the great prize which lay waiting for me at the end of my early struggles to get on in the world.’
‘So romantic!’ sighed my mother predictably.
‘Mr Aysgarth,’ I said, fascinated by his unembarrassed reference earlier in the conversation to the Deity whom my family felt it bad taste to discuss, ‘did God tell you to marry, just as He told you to be a clergyman?’
‘Be quiet, Venetia, and don’t interrupt,’ said my father irritably. ‘Sophie, why isn’t that child in bed?’
But my Mr Dean – my Mr Archdeacon as he was then – merely winked at me and said: ‘We might talk about God one day, Vanilla, if you’ve nothing better to do,’ and when both my parents demanded to know why he was addressing me as if I were an ice-cream, I realised with gratitude that he had diverted them from all thought of my bedtime.
According to various people who could remember her, Aysgarth’s first wife had been beautiful, intelligent, charming, religious and utterly devoted to her husband and children. Aysgarth seldom mentioned her but once when he said: ‘Grace was much too good for me,’ he sounded so abrupt that I realised any question about her would have exacerbated a grief which was still capable of being painfully recalled. The marriage had produced five children, four boys and a girl, Primrose, who was my age. The children were all either brilliantly clever or remarkably good-looking or, as in the case of Christian and Norman, both. James, the third son, was good-looking but not clever, and Alexander, the youngest, was clever but not good-looking. Primrose, who had a face like a horse, was brilliant and I became close friends with her, but I shall return to the subject of Primrose later.
Then in 1942 when Christian, the eldest, was fifteen and Alexander was little more than a baby, the first Mrs Aysgarth died and my Mr Archdeacon became entangled with the appalling creature who was to become his second wife. She was a society girl, famed for her eccentricities. Everyone declared that no woman could have been less suitable for a clergyman, but Aysgarth, bold as ever, ignored this judgement and lured his
femme fatale
to the altar soon after the end of the war. Everyone then proclaimed that the marriage would never last and he would be ruined, but ‘everyone’, for once, was wrong.
A year after the marriage came the vital meeting with my family. ‘All clergymen with balls should be encouraged!’ pronounced my father, and proceeded to throw his weight about at Westminster in an effort to win preferment for his new friend. Having devoted many years of his life to politics in the House of Lords my father was not without influence, and the Church of England, under the control of the Crown, was always vulnerable to the meddling of the Crown’s servants in the Lords and Commons. Usually the Church succeeded in going its own way without too much trouble, but although on ecclesiastical matters the Prime Minister took care to listen to the leading churchmen, he was not obliged to act on their advice. This situation occasionally reduced eminent clerics to apoplectic frenzy and led to chilly relations between Church and State.
Into this delicate constitutional minefield my father now charged, but fortunately it proved unnecessary for him to charge too hard because Aysgarth was well qualified for a choice promotion; he had been appointed archdeacon at an unusually early age after winning the attention of the famous Bishop Jardine who had romped around Starbridge in the 193os. Jardine had retired before the war in order to swill port in Oxfordshire, and without a powerful benefactor a self-made man such as Aysgarth might well have languished in the provinces for the rest of his career, but he did have an excellent curriculum vitae and my father did have the urge to play God. In consequence Aysgarth’s transfer to London, where his talents could be fully displayed to the people who mattered, was hardly a big surprise.
‘If you’re an agnostic,’ I said to my father at one stage of his campaign, ‘why are you getting so mixed up with the Church?’
‘The Church of England,’ said my father grandly, ‘belongs to all Englishmen, even unbelievers. It’s a national institution which for moral reasons deserves to be encouraged, and never forget, Venetia, that although I’m an agnostic and even, in moments of despair, an atheist, I remain always an exceedingly moral man. This means,
inter alia,
that I consider it my absolute moral duty to ensure that the Church is run by the very best men available.’
‘So it’s all right for me to be interested in the Church, is it?’
‘Yes, but never forget that the existence of God can’t be scientifically proved.’
‘Can the non-existence of God be scientifically proved?’ I enquired with interest, but my father merely told me to run away and play.
Aysgarth was still too young to be considered for a bishopric or a deanery, and when it was agreed by the Church authorities that a little London grooming was necessary in order to eliminate all trace of his modest background, a benign Prime Minister offered him a canonry at Westminster Abbey – although not the canonry attached to St Margaret’s church where so many society weddings took place. (This disappointed my mother, who was busy marrying off her eldest daughter at the time.) The canon’s house in Little Cloister had been badly damaged by a bomb during the war, but by 1946 it had been repaired and soon Aysgarth’s frightful second wife had turned the place into a nouveau-riche imitation of a mansion in Mayfair. I must name this woman. She had been christened Diana Dorothea but her acquaintances, even my father who shied away from Christian names, all referred to her as Dido despite the fact that they might be socially obliged to address her as ‘Mrs Aysgarth’. She was small, slim and smart; she dressed in a bold, striking style. Numerous falls from horses (the result of a mania for hunting) had bashed her face about so that she was ugly, but possibly she would have been ugly anyway. She always said exactly what she thought, a habit which regularly left a trail of devastation in her wake, and her wit – overrated, in my opinion – was as famous as her tactlessness. ‘Dido can always make me laugh,’ said my Mr Dean – my Canon, as he had now become. He was amazingly patient with her, always serene even when she was crashing around being monstrous, and his reward was her undisguised adoration. ‘Of course I could have married anyone,’ she declared carelessly once, ‘so wasn’t it too, too sweet of God to keep me single until I’d met darling Stephen?’
‘Is any further proof needed,’ muttered Primrose, ‘to demonstrate that God moves in mysterious ways?’
Primrose hated her stepmother.
‘Really, Primrose ...’ Those syllables always heralded some intolerable remark. ‘Really, Primrose, I can’t understand why you don’t invest in some padded bras. I certainly would if I was unfortunate enough to have your figure ...’
‘Really, Primrose, we must do something about your clothes! No wonder no man asks you out when you look like someone from a DP camp ...’
‘Really, Primrose, you must try not to be so possessive with your father – possessiveness, I’ve always thought, is inevitably the product of a low, limited little nature ...’
‘If she were my stepmother,’ I said to Primrose after witnessing one of these verbal assaults, ‘I’d murder her.’
‘Only the thought of the gallows deters me,’ said Primrose, but in fact it was her love for her father that drove her to endure Dido.
Aysgarth wound up fathering five children in his second marriage, but three died either before or shortly after birth and only a boy and a girl survived. Elizabeth was a little monster, just like her mother, but Philip was placid and gentle with an affectionate nature. Not even Primrose could object to little Pip, but she had a very jaundiced opinion of Elizabeth who would scramble up on to her father’s knees, fling her arms around his neck and demand his attention at every opportunity. Aysgarth complicated the situation by being far too indulgent with her, but Aysgarth was incapable of being anything but indulgent with little girls.
My father had naively thought that once Aysgarth was ensconced in the vital Westminster canonry peace would reign until the inevitable major preferment materialised, but before long Aysgarth’s reckless streak got the better of him and he was again taking scandalous risks. Having run a large archdeaconry he quickly became bored with his canonry, and as soon as he had mastered the intricacies of Abbey politics he decided to seek new worlds to conquer in his spare time. He then got mixed up with Bishop Bell of Chichester, a remarkable but controversial celebrity who was always tinkering with international brotherhood and ecumenism and other idealistic notions which the more earthbound politicians at Westminster dubbed ‘hogwash’. The most dangerous fact about Bishop Bell, however, was not that he peddled hogwash from the episcopal bench in the House of Lords, but that he was loathed by Mr Churchill, and as the Labour Government tottered in slow motion towards defeat, it became increasingly obvious that Mr Churchill would again become Prime Minister.
‘Think of your future, Aysgarth!’ implored my father. ‘It’s death to get on the wrong side of these politicians!’
‘Then I must die!’ said Aysgarth cheerfully. ‘I refuse to be an ecclesiastical poodle.’
‘But if you want to be a bishop or a dean –’
‘All I want is to serve God. Nothing else matters.’
My father groaned and buried his face in his hands.
‘What’s the difference between a bishop and a dean?’ I demanded, taking advantage of his speechlessness to plunge into the conversation, and Aysgarth answered: ‘A dean is the man in charge of a cathedral. A bishop is the man in charge of a diocese, which is like a county – a large area which contains in addition to the cathedral a number of churches all with their own parishes. A bishop has a special throne, his
cathedra, in
the cathedral and sometimes he goes there to worship, but often he’s looking after his flock by attending services all over the diocese.’
‘It’s as if the bishop’s the chairman of the board of a group of companies,’ said my father morosely, ‘and the dean is the managing director of the largest company. Aysgarth, how I wish you’d never got involved with that POW camp on Starbury Plain during the war! I can quite see how useful you arc to Bell when he needs someone to liaise with the German churches, but if you want to avoid antagonising Churchill you’ve got no choice: you must wash your hands of all those damned Huns without delay.’
‘I’m a disciple of Jesus Christ, not Pontius Pilate!’ said Aysgarth laughing. ‘Don’t talk to me of washing hands!’ And when my father finally laughed too, I thought what a hero Aysgarth was, unintimidated by my formidable father, unintimidated by the even more formidable Mr Churchill, and determined, like the star of a Hollywood western, to stand up for what he believed to be right.
However, real life is far less predictable than a Hollywood western, and contrary to what my father had supposed, Aysgarth’s work with the Germans failed to result in a lethal confrontation with Mr Churchill as the clock struck high noon. Bishop Bell was undergoing that metamorphosis which time so often works on people once judged controversial, and in the 1950s he became so hallowed that any hand-picked confederate of his could hardly fail to acquire a sheen of distinction. With Bell’s patronage Aysgarth became renowned as an expert on Anglo-German church relations. He formed the Anglo-German Churchmen’s Society; he raised funds to enable German refugees in England to train for the priesthood; he kept in touch with the numerous German POWs to whom he had once ministered in the Starbridge diocese. Like Bell, Aysgarth had been uncompromisingly opposed to Nazism, but he saw his post-war work with the Germans as a chance to exercise a Christian ministry of reconciliation, and in the end it was this ministry, not his canonry at Westminster, which in the eyes of the senior churchmen made him very much more than just a youthful ex-archdeacon from the provinces.