FIVE
‘Chastity is the expression of charity — of caring, enough. And this is the criterion for every form of behaviour, inside marriage or out of it, in sexual ethics or in any other field. For
nothing else
makes a thing right or wrong.’
JOHN A. T. ROBINSON
Suffragan Bishop of Woolwich 1959 —1969
Honest to
God
I
I overslept and missed not only the early service but Sunday matins. I did rush to the Cathedral in time for the sung Communion, but the Dean glided away afterwards without once looking in my direction. In despair I retired to the cloisters and waited on Lady Mary but no one came. I felt demented.
Back at the flat I wrote: ‘Darling Neville, I really was rather demolished by dinner last night. Any chance of seeing you before Wednesday? All love, V.’
Then I returned to the Cathedral with the idea of leaving the letter in the Dean’s stall to await his arrival for evensong, but the eagle-eyed Cathedral guides were everywhere and a stout lady arranging flowers by the lectern made any attempt to sidle unobserved to the stall impossible.
Stumbling home I tore up the letter and phoned the Deanery. Dido answered.
I hung up and mixed myself a dry martini which would have stopped even James Bond dead in his tracks. Then I slumped down on the sofa beneath the Elvis posters and began to cry.
II
‘... and when Bonhoeffer states that mankind has come of age,’ dictated the Bishop, ‘and implies that man — modern man — can get along without God, he is clearly flirting with nothing less than the Pelagian heresy. Or in other words, Dr Robinson follows Bonhoeffer on this point
at his peril.
‘
However,’ added Dr Ashworth kindly, stroking his pectoral cross as if it were a domestic pet, ‘the Bishop tries hard to redeem himself by stressing the importance to modern man of Christ, and indeed his view of Jesus is not entirely without merit. His statement, for instance, that Christ is the window through which we see God is well in line with orthodox thinking. Nevertheless I fear that when he mocks the traditional concept of the Incarnation in various facetious sentences, he not only diminishes the doctrine of God; he puts himself squarely in line with those who followed Arius in the days of the Early Church. What we are dealing with here,’ concluded Dr Ashworth, blissfully happy, ‘is yet another resurgence in a brand-new form of an age-old challenge to orthodoxy.’
And he proceeded to demolish both the Pelagian and the Arian heresies.
III
‘My darling, Pm desperately sorry — I got your letter yesterday, but I couldn’t meet you on Lady Mary because — oh hullo, General! Fancy seeing you here!’
‘Just had a spot of lunch, Dean.’ The General gazed at me with his protuberant, gooseberry-coloured eyes as I paused by the open door of Aysgarth’s car in the courtyard of the Staro Arms. ‘Good afternoon, Miss Flaxton.’
‘Good afternoon, General.’ I slid uneasily into the passenger seat.
‘Well, Venetia,’ said Aysgarth. ‘We mustn’t keep Lady Mary waiting, must we?’
‘It’s so kind of you to give me a lift,’ I said to him in ringing tones. The General was slightly deaf. ‘I do hope I’m not taking you too far out of your way.’
‘Were you in the dining-room, Miss Flaxton?’ said the General, now exhibiting a marked curiosity. ‘I didn’t see you.’
‘No, I was in the river-garden.’
Aysgarth said firmly: ‘If you’ll excuse us, General –’
‘Of course, of course ...’
As the car shot forward across the courtyard, Aysgarth muttered: ‘We’ll have to arrange a different rendezvous – we can’t risk that old buffer seeing us again.’
‘Never mind, we’re finally alone together. That’s all that matters.’
The car roared with a screech of the tires into Eternity Street and rocketed away towards the river and the suburbs.
IV
‘My darling, why were you so upset in your letter? Why did you want to meet me last night on Lady Mary?’
‘It was that dinner-party.’
‘I knew you’d find it dull, but –’
‘Dull! Do you think I simply wanted to whine that I was bored? I tell you it was vile – vile, vile,
vile!
’
He was very shocked. ‘But what happened?’
‘Let’s wait till we get to the car-park. I can’t possibly discuss this unless I have your full attention.’
In response he promptly trod on the brakes, pulled the car round the corner into a side-road and halted beneath the branches of a chestnut tree. We had crossed the river by that time and were in one of the quiet, dignified residential streets of the suburb called Parson’s Mill.
Switching off the engine he demanded: ‘What did Dido say?’ I tried without success to speak.
‘You shouldn’t take any notice of her,’ he said. ‘Just let all those words pour off you like water off a duck’s back.’
‘Unfortunately,’ I said, ‘her words aren’t water and I’m no duck.’ I stared fiercely out of the window at the flower-filled front garden of the nearest house as I added: ‘I’m sorry – I know you don’t want to talk about her –’
‘I’ll talk about her till the cows come home if that’ll put things right. Tell me exactly what she said.’
‘It wasn’t so much what she said as what she implied.’
‘And what was that?’
But I was silent. In the end all I could say was: ‘I had this horrible feeling that she knows everything about us.’
‘Impossible.’
‘She said you discuss everything together –’
‘Hardly! Do you think I tell her about my Wednesday excursions?’
‘But what do you say to explain your absences?’
‘Nothing. She’s out playing bridge with her girlfriends. It’s a regular four. Next week, when she’s the hostess at the Deanery, I shall have to take a little more care when I slip out, but she’ll be much too busy to notice me.’
‘But if she suspects we meet, she’ll watch you more closely and –’
‘She suspects nothing. It sounds to me as if you’ve completely misread her. The trouble with reading Dido is that she shoots innumerable arrows at the target of truth and just because she scores a certain number of bull’s-eyes one can easily be fooled into thinking not only that she hits the mark every time but that she knows much more than she actually does. Now listen to me and I’ll set your mind at rest by explaining exactly what’s going on. You’re female, under thirty and congenial to me so Dido’s going to be lukewarm towards you. Nothing new there, of course; that’s been the situation for years and from Dido’s point of view little has changed. But from your point of view everything’s changed – which explains why you’re now ultra-sensitive to every arrow Dido shoots from her bow. But what you should remember is that from Dido’s point of view the only change in the situation is your mysterious decision to stay in Starbridge and live in a déclassé flat when you could be bobbing around London and living somewhere smart.’
‘Exactly. Dido probably thinks —’
‘No, she doesn’t. I’ve pointed out that this is the 1960s and upper-class girls are no longer as hidebound by convention as they were twenty — even ten — years ago. You’ve always been intrigued by the ecclesiastical — what could be more natural than that you should be unable to say no when the Bishop, very flatteringly, offers you a job? And since you’ve finally made the break with your parents, what could be more natural than that you should rebel against your upbringing in a stately home by living in a small flat? Dido, I assure you, quite saw the logic of that argument, and as soon as you pushed your religious conversion claim on Saturday night she was fully prepared to concede that your continuing presence in Starbridge was no longer a mystery. She was actually very benign towards you, said how greatly you’d improved —’
‘You discussed me, then,’ I said, ‘after the party.’
‘Oh, we discussed everyone! We always have a post-mortem on our social events!’
‘Yes. She did in fact say that you go to her bedroom every night for a cosy little chat.’
There was a silence while I stared fiercely at the flowers again, but at last I heard him say: ‘Darling, you don’t have to be jealous of Dido.’
‘Why not?’ I swung to face him. ‘She’s your wife, isn’t she?’
‘Yes, but ...’ Now it was his turn to stare at the flowers. Then he said: ‘Try to understand. She’s a sad person in many ways. She has many difficulties. She needs someone to look after her and I’m the one who’s been called to do it. But all that has absolutely no bearing on the strength of my love for you.’
‘You mean — what you’re really saying is —’
Dido’s Stephen’s responsibility,’ he said. ‘But neither of them has anything to do with us.’
I stared at him but he was smiling as if he had not compounded the mystery but elucidated it. ‘Feeling better?’ he said lightly. ‘Shall we go on?’
I nodded. I felt I needed time to think. Reaching out he gave my hand a comforting squeeze and then started the engine to resume our journey.
V
‘We really must walk up to the Ring today,’ said Aysgarth, parking the Humber. ‘I feel we need to be wary of too many delicious incarcerations in the car.’
We set off along the bridle-path which led upwards over the ridge, and soon vast views of the Plain began to unfold in every direction. Aysgarth’s was the only car in the parking area, but ahead of us some hikers were moving steadily towards the brow of the hill.
‘Are you all right?’ he said, reaching for my hand. ‘You’re very quiet.’
‘I was just thinking that although I’ve known you for so many years, I don’t really know you at all. This Stephen whom you now talk of as a separate person — when did he come into being?’
‘1946.’
‘But you married Dido in 1945 and I thought she’d always called you Stephen!’
‘Yes, but it took me a while to grow into him, and I was still Neville in 1945. That was Neville Three,’ he added placidly, apparently unaware that the conversation was in any way bizarre. ‘Now, of course, I’m Neville Four.’ Pausing for breath he turned to survey the landscape. The hill was steeper than it looked from the car-park. ‘My goodness, what splendid views! he exclaimed. ‘But I don’t like the look of those black clouds over there.’
‘Never mind the black clouds. Tell me about the first three Nevilles.’
Without a second’s hesitation he said: ‘Oh, they wouldn’t interest you at all.’
‘Everything about you interests me, Neville. I love you so I want to know you through and through.’
‘My darling!’ He gave me his sexiest smile. ‘How very sweet you are, but I think we’ve wasted quite enough of our precious time together talking about matters which just aren’t relevant to our wonderful love here and now in the summer of ‘sixty-three. I want to talk about
you!
Tell me everything you’ve been doing – how’s life at the South Canonry?’
I gave up and began to describe the Bishop’s continuing demolition of heresy.
VI
‘Charles has got it entirely wrong as usual,’ said Aysgarth. ‘He’s misunderstood the Bonhoeffer dictum and he’s perverted Robin-son’s views on the Incarnation. The truth is Robinson’s remarks on Jesus clearly indicate – whoops! Here comes the rain! What an unjust reward for my virtuous attempt to exercise!’
Haring downhill hand in hand as the heavens opened, we reached the car and hurled ourselves inside.
‘How out of training I am!’ gasped Aysgarth as he subsided behind the steering-wheel. ‘Darling, if I drop dead, abandon me at once, I implore you, and thumb a lift back to Starbridge. I’d hate to embarrass everyone by dying in scandalous circumstances ... Good heavens, look at this!’ he added as the rain began to pound more heavily than ever against the windscreen.
‘There was a very erotic song in the hit parade some time ago,’ I said, watching him smooth back his wet hair. ‘It was called "The Day that the Rains Came."‘
‘Did it conjure up images of wet earth and steaming grass and people plunging naked through the undergrowth?’
‘You’re thinking of D. H. Lawrence!’
We laughed, and suddenly the expression in his eyes changed. For a moment I thought he would do no more than look at me, but I was wrong. He leant forward to kiss me on the mouth.
Then I ceased to hear the rain drumming on the roof, ceased to sec the water streaming down the glass, ceased to think of anything except the man I wanted – and alongside us in the land of allegory the powerful, predatory serpent, no longer sedate and domesticated, surged forth from the undergrowth to encircle us both at last.
VII
‘It can’t be wrong,’ said Aysgarth. ‘I just don’t believe it’s wrong. Love makes everything right. It must do. It must.’
I was unable to reply. I was aware of a variety of physical reactions which I have no intention of describing in clinical detail, but my awareness was dim because I was almost unconscious with ecstasy. I could only stay glued to his wet shirt-front and pray not to weep with frustration when the embrace inevitably ended.
Then I heard him whisper: ‘You’re such a prize, Venetia,
such
a prize!
So of course,’ he added with a sigh as he finally released me, ‘I must never win you.’
At first I thought I had misheard him. ‘Never win me?’
‘No, I must keep you perfect. All prizes are perfect, naturally, or they wouldn’t be prizes, but winning them can be dangerous. One can win a prize, discover its imperfections and then realise one doesn’t want it any more.’
I stared at him. Yet again he seemed quite unaware that the conversation had become bizarre. ‘Are you implying,’ I said incredulously, ‘that if you won me you’d soon get bored and toss me aside?’
‘No, I’m merely reminding myself that if I won you I’d be winning a flesh-and-blood person, not a fantasy, and we might well fail to live happily ever after – or in other words, I was reminding myself that chasing the prizes can lead one into a world of illusion. It’s always vital that I remember that.’
‘Neville, all this talk of prizes –’
‘Yes, it’s absurd, isn’t it? It used to be a fixation of mine, the result of my impoverished youth and an uncle who urged me to go "chasing the prizes of life" in order to make the best of myself. But I’ve got a more balanced outlook on life now.’ He fumbled in the pocket of his jacket and produced a packet of cigarettes. ‘Shall we smoke?’
I waited until our cigarettes were alight before I said: ‘Eddie mentioned that uncle of yours.’
‘Uncle Willoughby — a marvellous old boy he was, took care of us all in the difficult days after my father died. No doubt it was because my life was so far from perfect then that I used to dream of perfection — to dream, as Uncle Willoughby would have put it, of the ultimate prizes: a perfect home, a perfect career, a perfect wife, perfect children —’
‘But Neville,’ I said, ‘no one’s really perfect, are they?’ I was remembering Primrose telling me long ago of her brothers’ unflagging efforts to acquire flawless masks.
No, of course true perfection can’t exist in this world,’ he agreed willingly enough, ‘but one should still dream of perfection, cherish ideals, aim for the finest prizes — goals, I mean —’
‘There you go again!’
He laughed. ‘I’m incorrigible, aren’t I! Let’s talk of something else.’
No, I want to talk more about you.’
‘But there’s nothing to say! You know it all.’
‘Do I? I know you were born in Yorkshire and that your father died bankrupt when you were seven. I know you and your brother were then boarded out in London in order to go to a good school while your mother’s poor health forced her to live by the sea in Sussex with your sister. I know you won a scholarship to Oxford where you took a first in Greats and received your call to be a clergyman. I know you married at twenty-four and had five children. I know you were Rector of Willowmead, Archdeacon of Starbridge and a canon of Westminster. I know that after your first wife died you married again and had five more children, only two of whom survived. I know you’re now Dean of Starbridge. Yes, it’s quite true — I do know all about you. So why do I increasingly feel you’re a complete stranger?’
‘My darling, I can’t imagine why you’re so keen to wrap me in mystery! I’m just a Yorkshire draper’s son who’s made good. What could be more simple than that?’
‘I’ll tell you: all the Yorkshire drapers’ sons who haven’t made good. They’re the simple ones. I now realise that you must be quite extraordinary and tremendously complex, but I don’t see how I’m ever going to know you through and through when you resolutely refuse to talk about yourself.’
‘But you understand me perfectly! You’re so sympathetic, so intuitive, so clever, so —’
‘Thank you, I hope I’m all those things, but —’
‘You’re all those things and much, much more,’ he said, stubbing out his cigarette and switching on the ignition, ‘so can’t you see how unnecessary it is to delve into my utterly irrelevant past? Neville Four doesn’t have a past, that’s the truth of it. He just has this glorious present with you.’
I took the hint and pursued my cross-examination no further, but as the Humber descended from the hills into the valley, I began to wonder if I understood even less than I had imagined.