Glittering Images

‘If you want to know me better,’ she said at last, ‘why don’t you set the pace by helping me to know more about you? Most men usually can’t wait to recite their life-histories, but you seem peculiarly reticent.’

‘I didn’t intend this to be a history lesson. I’d rather talk about the present.’

‘What’s wrong with your past?’

‘It’s boring. I was born in the right county in the right residential neighbourhood of one of the right towns. My father has the right sort of profession and my mother indulges in the right sort of hobbies. I went to the right schools and the right university, got myself ordained at the right age and began my right career at the right time with the right man. Then I taught at the right places, wrote the right book and eventually became a Canon of the right cathedral. It’s all very dull, isn’t it? Dr Jardine’s past is so much more interesting than mine.’

All Lyle said was, ‘You’ve left out the right marriage to the right wife.’

‘So I have. Careless of me. I suppose that was because she did the wrong thing and died.’

We walked on. The sun blazed on the grassy hills dotted with sheep, and as we moved towards the summit of the ridge the view began to expand in every direction. It was uncannily quiet.

At last Lyle said, ‘You don’t give much away.’

‘Does anyone, even the people who rush to recite the carefully selected facts of their life at tedious length?’ I was trying to establish a line of conversation which would tempt her to rebut my argument with disclosures about herself, but she merely said with detachment, ‘I agree that the exact truth about people is usually impossible to know, but I think most of the time one can make an accurate guess about what goes on.’ She paused to look back across the valley behind us. ‘Take the Starmouths, for example,’ she said. ‘The Earl’s a good decent Englishman of the old school who takes a conscientious interest in his estates, does his bit for the country by a regular attendance at the House of Lords, and is devoted to his wife and children. Lady Starmouth probably gets a bit bored with him but she’s fundamentally good and decent too so she doesn’t rattle around like a society hostess but amuses herself instead with the safest class of men – clergymen, who have a strong stake in sticking to the proprieties. Now, I’m not saying this is the exact truth about either of the Starmouths, but I think the odds are I’ve given you an accurate thumbnail sketch. I mean, I don’t seriously believe, do you, that Lady Starmouth is a secret drug-fiend while the Earl keeps a mistress in St John’s Wood?’

‘Lady Starmouth is certainly not a secret drug-fiend. But –’ I thought of the Earl’s candid admiration of Loretta ‘– I don’t think I’m as sure as you are about that mistress in St John’s Wood. Over the years I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s impossible to make reliable guesses about anyone’s intimate life.’ Without looking at her directly I was nevertheless poised to analyse her reaction.

But she merely said, ‘Isn’t the Earl a little old for fun and games in St John’s Wood?’

‘He might consider a mistress rejuvenating. But no,’ I said with a smile as we moved on again towards the summit of the ridge, ‘I confess I don’t really believe the Earl has a secret love-life any more than I believe Lady Starmouth is burning to seduce the Bishop.’

She laughed. ‘Lady Starmouth’s whole success with the Bishop lies in the fact that she at least would never play the over-passionate female in his company!’

‘Are there so many over-passionate females besieging Dr Jardine?’

Lyle suddenly chose to treat the subject seriously. ‘Not now,’ she said. ‘A bishop’s more on a pedestal than an ordinary clergyman, but there were one or two very tricky women when he was Dean of Radbury, and apparently when he was Vicar of St Mary’s he was forever fending off society women who were far less principled than Lady Starmouth.’

I said equally seriously, to show that I understood the problems which could exist for certain clergymen, ‘But surely troublesome women reserve their most ardent attentions for bachelors?’

‘Oh, no doubt life became fractionally less hectic once he was married but unfortunately many women even today are tempted to write Mrs Jardine off as insignificant and imagine that the Bishop’s languishing in an unhappy marriage. However that’s rubbish, of course. The Jardines may seem to a stranger to be ill-assorted but anyone who knows them well will tell you they’re devoted to each other. It’s an attraction of opposites.’

We had reached the top of the ridge while she was speaking, and as we paused to survey the view we found that the outlines of the landscape soon faded into the heat-haze. Abandoning the obscure prospect across the valley I turned my attention to Starbury Ring which was now visible less than fifty yards away. The Ring consisted of two dozen tall rocks, planted several thousand years ago for purposes which were no longer known but which at once conjured up images in my mind of human sacrifices and other horrors of heathen worship. I thought how comforting it would be to believe that all bloodstained idolatry in Europe now lay sealed in the past, and for a moment I wished I were a Victorian who still had faith in the doctrine of progress. How delightful it must have been to look forward with confidence to the time when mankind would have achieved its inevitable perfection! How soothing to be able to picture an immanent, cosily accessible God who could be known with the aid of reason and a good education! But now the War had destroyed the illusion of progress, bloodstained idolatry was once more invading Europe, and the powerful mind of Karl Barth had perceived that God was remote, utterly transcendent, capable of being known only by revelation.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said suddenly to Lyle. ‘The sight of pagan stones sent me off at a theological tangent. You were saying the Jardines were devoted to each other –’

‘Yes, Mrs Jardine adores the Bishop, and the Bishop, like all men, adores being adored. Of course she gets on his nerves occasionally – well, you saw that this morning, didn’t you? – but on the whole he considers a little irritation a small price to pay for a wife who’s genuinely good, very popular and thoroughly loyal to him in every way.’

‘The Bishop seems to have a most remarkable talent for surrounding himself with adoring women!’

‘The talent’s probably developed in reaction to his bleak childhood. Adoration was in short supply then.’

‘I thought he had a devoted stepmother?’

‘She wasn’t demonstrative. Until he was eighteen he hadn’t a clue how she felt.’

‘What happened when he was eighteen?’

‘He went up to Oxford, and when he said goodbye to her she cried. It was her supreme moment of triumph, you see. She’d singled him out as the best of the bunch and put him on the road to Oxford, but he’d always thought he was just a hobby for her as she had no children of her own.’ Lyle paused before adding: ‘I think probably in the beginning he really was just a hobby for her, but after a while she found that her ambition for him gave her the determination to endure a difficult marriage. “It was worth it all for Adam,” she said to me at the end of her life. She used to call him Adam. She hated the name Alex, thought it was frivolous, a nasty affectation of the Cobden-Smiths. “Adam’s not really Alex,” she said to me once. “Alex is just a mask, and beyond the mask there’s the Adam nobody knows except me.” That was a sinister thing to say, wasn’t it? I look at the Bishop sometimes and think: there’s an Adam in there somewhere! What a mysterious thing personality is, how eerie, how unfathomable …’

We were now standing in the middle of the stone circle. The stones themselves, stark and dark beneath their green-brown lichen, heightened the mystery of the Ring as it stood in that empty landscape, and seemed to bring the remote past deep into the present. I felt as if the Druids were brushing shoulders with Karl Barth as one bloodstained century merged into another in defiance of any conventional conception of time.

‘This seems an appropriate place to discuss mysteries,’ I said, ‘and particularly the mystery of personality. Let’s sit down for a moment.’

When we were chastely settled two feet apart in the shadow of one of the stones I offered her a cigarette. ‘Do you smoke?’

‘Only in my bedroom. But if you’re going to have a treat I don’t see why I shouldn’t have one too.’

‘You look like the kind of woman who smokes “Craven A”.’

‘Oh, so you see me as an adventuress!’

‘Let’s just say I have trouble seeing you as a companion in a clerical household.’ As I lit our cigarettes I noticed that her hands were small and that the large signet-ring emphasized the delicate curve of her finger. The skin on the inside of her wrist was very white.

‘Are you sure you’re not going to pounce on me again?’ she said after her first puff. ‘You’ve got a pounce-ish look.’

‘That’s because you’re so pounce-worthy. Now stop egging me on by putting impure thoughts in my head and tell me more about this Swedish stepmother. I’m interested in the influence she must have had on Dr Jardine.’

III

‘I first met her at Radbury,’ said Lyle. ‘She visited the Jardines there a couple of times, but then travel became too difficult because of her arthritis. The Bishop used to visit her in Putney whenever he could but I myself never saw her again until she came to live with us in Starbridge at the end of her life.’

‘It’s nice to think she ended her days with her Adam in his palace.’

‘Another edifying tale? Yes, I suppose it was, although the situation wasn’t entirely a bed of roses because poor Carrie was terrified of her stepmother-in-law. However,’ said Lyle, effortlessly glossing over the crisis which had shaken the palace to its foundations, ‘we all got on very well in the end. Old Mrs J. had decided that God was giving her a chance to redeem her previous coldness towards Carrie.’

‘She was religious?’

‘Yes, she’d been a Lutheran originally, like so many Swedes, but she’d been married to a man who thought institutional religion was rubbish, so she hadn’t been a regular churchgoer.’

‘But I thought Dr Jardine’s father was a religious fanatic!’

‘The fanaticism took an anti-clerical form. He thought all clergymen were instruments of the Devil.’

‘How extraordinarily difficult for Dr Jardine!’

‘Being married to a religious crank was hardly easy for old Mrs J.!’

‘Did she confide in you? It sounds as if she did.’

‘Yes, she enjoyed telling a sympathetic stranger about all the ghastliness she’d endured in the old days so that “her Adam”, as you called him, should survive his appalling home. Her first big battle was to get him to school. Old Mr J. thought schools were sinks of iniquity.’

‘He certainly sounds the most tiresome husband. Did she never consider abandoning Putney and bolting for Sweden? Or did her religious beliefs, such as they were, make an escape out of the question?’

‘There’s no doubt religious belief played a large part in her decision to stay – she became convinced she’d been sent into the family in order to save that child. “I felt it was a call from God,” she said. “I felt no other action was possible.”’

‘But surely once Dr Jardine was grown up – once he’d got to Oxford –’