VI
Apparently Mrs Ashworth had grown up in a remote Norfolk parish where her great-uncle had been the vicar; her parents had died young. This clerical background had enabled her to obtain the post of companion to Bishop Jardine’s wife when Jardine himself, rocketing racily up the Church’s ladder of preferment, had been appointed Dean of Radbury in the ‘twenties. Five years later in 1932 he had become the Bishop of Starbridge. In 1937, the young Charles Ashworth, already a doctor of divinity, had decided to visit Starbridge to do some research in the Cathedral Library, and since he was the protégé of Archbishop Lang he had been invited to stay at the episcopal palace. Crossing the threshold he had fallen instantly and violently in love with Mrs Jardine’s companion.
Since Mrs Jardine had been an ineffectual woman who had relied on her companion to run the palace for her, this
coup de foudre
had caused chaos, but Ashworth, much to the Bishop’s fury, had refused to be deflected from his romantic charge to the altar.
‘The whole trouble was,’ said Aysgarth, ‘that Lyle’s departure was a bereavement for the Jardines as well as a crippling inconvenience. They were a childless couple who’d come to regard her as a daughter, and they’d reached the stage where they couldn’t imagine life without her.’
‘Presumably they were all reconciled later?’
‘Oh yes, but back in
1
937 –’
‘– the Jardine dragon had to be vanquished before St George could carry away the maiden on his shining white horse!’
‘As a matter of fact whether he was a saint and she was a maiden was hotly debated later when the two of them produced a baby only seven months after the wedding, but since the infant was very small and delicate, just as a premature baby should be, everyone eventually agreed that the maiden’s purity had been unsullied prior to her marriage.’
‘Rather tricky to be a clergyman,’ I said, ‘and produce a baby a shade too fast.’
‘Most embarrassing for poor Charles! However I never had any serious doubt that he’d behaved himself – he was always too ambitious to do anything else.’ As an afterthought he added: ‘He was married before – his first wife was killed in a car crash– but although he was a widower for some time before he met Lyle you can be sure he kept himself in order. The first thing a successful young clergyman learns to acquire, if he wants to continue as a success, is an immaculate self-control in dealing with women.’
‘At least nowadays clergymen can get married, which is more than poor St Augustine could – although actually I don’t understand why St Augustine couldn’t marry. Why did he have to be celibate?’
‘Well, in the days of the Early Church ...’
We embarked on a fascinating conversation about the origins of clerical celibacy, and Aysgarth promised to lend me his copy of St Augustine’s
Confessions.
‘
My dear Venetia,’ he sighed at last as he finished his whisky and rose reluctantly to his feet, ‘how very much I enjoy talking to you!’
I smiled radiantly at him and felt like a sizzler.
VII
I should perhaps make it clear that contrary to the impression I may have created while describing the turning point of his career, I did not see Aysgarth often. He led a busy life at Westminster, and I was often away. After leaving boarding school I had been obliged to endure periods of exile in Switzerland and Italy, and even when I returned to England I often sneaked down to Flaxton Pauncefoot in order to escape from the ghastly London social events where I was either ignored or treated as a freak. Life drifted on. I had no idea what I wanted to do. My métier seemed to consist of sipping drinks, smoking cigarettes and reading books. There was no calling, no summons from God written in the sky in letters of fire, and increasingly often it seemed to me that my career as an adult was incapable of beginning so long as I remained condemned to the sidelines of life by my unfortunate looks and my embarrassing intellectual inclinations.
Sometimes I gave way to despair. Supposing I had to suffer the ultimate horror of not marrying? Then I would be ‘poor old Venetia’, that pathetic freak, till my dying day. The prospect was intolerable. My depression deepened. My parents found me increasingly difficult, and soon after the Aysgarth-Ashworth dinner-party they decided that something would have to be done.
It was unusual for my parents to stage a joint attack. My mother preferred to leave the bombastic behaviour to my father and take refuge in the conservatory, but on this occasion she was apparently desperate enough to decide that I was more important than her plants.
‘We just thought we’d have a little word, darling,’ she said soothingly after we had all assembled for battle in the drawing-room of our house in Lord North Street. ‘Your father’s actually quite worried about you.’
‘Worried?’ said my father, bristling with rage. ‘I’m not worried, I’m livid! I shouldn’t have to deal with a recalcitrant daughter at my age — it’s bad for my blood pressure.’
‘You should have thought of that,’ I said tartly, ‘before you frolicked around with Mama in Venice in 1936.’
‘
Frolicked?
What a damn silly word — makes me sound like a bloody pansy!’
‘Oh, do stop screaming at each other!’ begged my mother, fanning herself lightly with the latest edition of
Homes and Gardens.
‘
What
happened in ‘thirty-six is quite irrelevant — except that here you are, Venetia, and we have to help you make the best of your life — which means we simply must insist that you now stop frivolling and —’
‘Frivolling?’ I mimicked. ‘What a damn silly word! Makes me sound like a bloody butterfly!’
‘Oh my God,’ said my mother, taking refuge in
Homes and Gardens.
‘
Just because you happen to be reading St Augustine’s
Con
fessions,
’
said my father, storming into the attack, ‘you needn’t think you’re not frittering away your time — and I must say, I think Aysgarth should have asked my permission before he lent 54 you that book. Parts of it are most unsuitable for an unmarried young woman.’
‘If you mean that incident in the public baths when Augustine was fourteen —’
‘What a lovely picture of a cyclamen!’ murmured my mother, gazing enrapt at a page of her magazine.
‘If you’d gone up to Oxford,’ said my father to me, ‘as I wanted you to, you wouldn’t be lying around sipping gin at odd hours, smoking those disgusting cigarettes and reading about fourteen-year-old boys in public baths!’
‘If I’d gone up to Oxford,’ I said, ‘I’d be studying the work of Greek pederasts, ordering champagne by the case and damn
well looking at
fourteen-year-old boys in public baths!’
‘Now look here, you two,’ said my mother, reluctantly tossing her magazine aside, ‘this won’t do. Ranulph, you must try not to get so upset. Venetia, you must stop talking like a divorcée in an attempt to shock him — and you must try to remember that since he watched his own father die of drink and his brother die of — well, we won’t mention what he died of — your father has an absolute horror of the havoc wealth can cause among people who lack the self-discipline to lead worthwhile, productive lives. The truth is that people like us, who are privileged, should never forget that privileges are always accompanied by responsibilities. We have a moral duty to devote our wealth and our time to worthy causes and live what the lower orders can see is a decent upright life.’
‘Hear, hear!’ bellowed my father.
‘I’m sure you think that was a dreadfully old-fashioned speech,’ pursued my mother, encouraged by this roar of approval to sound uncharacteristically forceful, ‘but believe me, it’s neither smart nor clever to be an effete member of the aristocracy. You
must
be occupied in some acceptable manner, and fortunately for you, since you live today and not yesterday, that means you can train for an interesting job. I do understand, I promise you, why you chose not to go up to Oxford; being a blue-stocking isn’t every woman’s dream of happiness. But since you’ve rejected an academic life you must choose some 55 other career to pursue while you fill in your time before getting married. After all, even Arabella had a job arranging flowers in a hotel! I know she wound up in a muddle with that Italian waiter, but –’
‘I don’t want to arrange flowers in a hotel.’
‘Well, perhaps if you were to take a nice cordon bleu cookery course at Winkfield –’
‘I don’t want to take a nice cordon bleu cookery course at Winkfield.’
‘You don’t want to do anything,’ said my father. ‘It’s an absolute waste of a first-class brain. Awful. Tragic. It makes me want to –’
‘Ranulph,’ said my mother, ‘don’t undo all my good work, there’s a pet. Venetia –’
‘I think I’d like to be a clergyman.’
‘Darling, do be serious!’
‘All right, all right, I’ll take a secretarial course! At least that’ll be better than arranging bloody flowers!’
‘I can’t stand it when women swear,’ said my father. ‘Kindly curb your language this instant.’
‘You may have spent a lot of your life declaring in the name of your liberal idealism that men and woman should be treated equally,’ I said, ‘but I’ve never met a man who was so reluctant to practise what he preached! If you really believed in sexual equality you’d sit back and let me say "bloody" just as often as you do!’
‘I give up,’ said my mother. ‘I’m off to the conservatory.’
‘And I’m off to the Athenaeum,’ said my father. ‘I simply daren’t stay here and risk a stroke any longer.’
‘How typical!’ I scoffed. ‘The champion of equality once again takes refuge in an all-male club!’
‘Bloody impertinence!’ roared my father.
‘Bloody hypocrite!’ I shouted back, and stormed out, slamming the door.
If I had been living in the ‘sixties I might then have left home and shared a flat with cronies; I might have taken to drink or drugs (or both) and chased after pop singers, or I might have opened a boutique or become a feminist or floated off to Nepal to find a guru. But I was living in the ‘fifties, that last gasp of the era which had begun in those lost years before the war, and in those days nice young girls ‘just didn’t do that kind of thing’, as the characters in
Hedda Gabler
say.
(Hedda Gabler
was one of Aysgarth’s favourite plays; he adored that clever doomed sizzler of a heroine.) It was also a fact that in between the acrimonious rows my life at home was much too comfortable to abandon in a fit of pique. My parents, exercising a policy of benign neglect, were usually at pains to avoid breathing down my neck, ordering me about and preaching nauseous sermons about setting an example to the lower orders. I was waited on hand and foot, well fed and well housed. In short, I had sufficient incentives to postpone a great rebellion, and besides, like Hedda Gabler, I shied away from any idea of not conforming to convention. If I flounced around being a rebel I knew I would only earn the comment: ‘Poor old Venetia – pathetic as ever!’ and wind up even worse off than I already was.
So after that row with my parents in
1957
I did not rush immediately upstairs to pack my bags. I gritted my teeth and faced what I saw as the cold hard facts of life: no longer could I sit around sipping gin, smoking cigarettes and soaking up the sexy reminiscences of St Augustine. The day of reckoning for my refusal to go up to Oxford was at hand, and just like any other (usually middle-class) girl who considered that the hobbies of flower-arranging and playing with food were far beneath her, I had to embark on a secretarial training.
However as I reflected that night on my capitulation to parental bullying, I thought I could face my reorganised future without too much grief; a secretarial course could well be my passport to what I thought of as Real Life, the world beyond my mother’s gardens and my father’s clubs, a world in which people actually lived – swilling and swearing, fighting and fornicating – instead of merely existing bloodlessly in charity committee meetings or in cloud-cuckoo-lands such as the Athenaeum and the House of Lords.
I decided to go to Mrs Hoster’s Secretarial College because Primrose had attended a course there while I had been fighting off death by boredom in Switzerland and Italy. Like me, Primrose had been encouraged by her school to try for a place at Oxford, but she had convinced me that an Oxford education was the one thing we both had to avoid if we were to have any hope of experiencing Real Life in the future.
‘Christian told me frankly it would reduce my chance of marrying to nil,’ she had confided, ‘and there’s no doubt spinsters are always regarded with contempt. Besides, how on earth could I go up to Oxford and leave poor Father all alone with Dido? He’d go mad if he didn’t have me to talk to whenever she was driving him round the bend.’ Primrose had never been away from home. She had attended St Paul’s Girls School in London while I had been incarcerated at Cheltenham Ladies’ College, and I had always secretly resented the fact that her father had considered her indispensable while mine had been willing to consign me to an institution.
Although Primrose was anxious to marry eventually, just as a successful woman should, she never seemed to mind having no boyfriends. Instead she channelled her gregarious inclinations towards forming a circle of female friends whom her brothers condescendingly referred to as ‘the Gang’. Some of the Gang had been at school with her, some had been débutantes with us in 1955 and some had been her classmates at Mrs Hoster’s. Aysgarth adored us all. Dido used to refer to us as ‘Stephen’s Little Harem’ and look indulgent. ‘Name your favourite of the day!’ we would tease him as he sat beaming on the sofa and we lounged on the carpet at his feet, but he would sigh: ‘I can’t decide! It’s as if you were asking a chocolate addict to select from a row of equally luscious peppermint creams!’
When the Aysgarths moved to Starbridge in 1957, it was thought the Gang might drift apart, but Starbridge was an easy journey by train from London and the core of the Gang kept in touch. Abandoning all thought of a secretarial career in London, Primrose landed a job at the diocesan office on Eternity Street, and in order to avoid constant clashes with Dido she had her own flatlet in the Deanery’s former stables. Time ticked on. I completed my secretarial training and drifted through a series of jobs in art galleries and antique shops and publishing houses. Then with the dawn of the new decade the Gang at last began to disintegrate. Penny and Sally got married, Belinda joined the Wrens, Tootsie became an actress and was expelled from the Gang for Conduct Unbecoming, Midge dropped out to grow daffodils in the Scilly Isles, and by 1963 only I was left in ‘Stephen’s Little Harem’ – The last peppermint cream left in the box!’ as my chocolate-loving Mr Dean put it so saucily, much to his wife’s annoyance.
‘You really should make more effort to get married, Venetia,’ she said soon afterwards. ‘In the game of life women who don’t marry are inevitably regarded
as
such amateurs, and you wouldn’t want people to look down on you pityingly, would you, my dear? That’s one thing a clever girl can never endure.’
I could have withstood that woman better if she had been merely mad and bad. But it was her talent for disembowelling her victims with the knife of truth which made her so thoroughly dangerous to know.
It was 1963. The innocent days were almost over, and in the early spring, just after John Robinson, the suffragan bishop of Woolwich, published the book which was to shake the Church of England to its foundations, the foundations of my own world were at last rocked by the earthquake of change. Exasperated by my failure to stay in any job longer than a year, my father went to great trouble to obtain a post for me at the Liberal Party’s headquarters. I handed in my notice a week later.
‘How dare you do this to me!’ shouted my father, who was now seventy-two and even less capable of managing a recalcitrant daughter.
‘My dear Papa, I’m the victim, not you! I was the one who actually had to work at that ghastly place!’
‘Well, if you think you can loaf around under my roof doing nothing for the next six months –’
‘Nothing would induce me to loaf around under your roof a day longer!’ I said, almost twenty-six years old and finally summoning the strength to burst out of my luxurious prison. ‘I’m off to Starbridge to meditate on God and contemplate Eternity – which is exactly what you ought to be doing at your age!’
And having delivered myself of this speech, which could be guaranteed to infuriate any humanist past endurance, I embarked on my journey into adventure.