Scandalous Risks

‘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 are 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.

‘It was a terrible risk to mess around with all those damned Huns,’ said my father, ‘but he’s got away with it.’ And indeed Aysgarth’s failure, once he turned fifty, to receive his big preferment lay not in the fact that he had aligned himself with the pro-German Bishop Bell; it lay in the fact that he had a disastrous wife.

Dido prided herself on being a successful hostess. Her dinner-parties were patronised by an astonishing range of distinguished guests who enjoyed her eccentric remarks, but clerical wives are hardly supposed to toss off letters to the newspapers on controversial issues or make withering remarks about the Mothers’ Union during an interview with a women’s magazine. The press were rapidly enthralled with appalling results. Dido stopped giving interviews but could seldom resist a tart comment on any matter of public interest. (‘What do you think of the conquest of Everest, Mrs Aysgarth?’ Thank God someone’s finally done it – I’m bored to death with the wretched molehill!’ ‘Do you believe in capital punishment, Mrs Aysgarth?’ ‘Certainly! Flog ’em and hang ’em – and why not crucify ’em too? What was good enough for Our Lord ought to be good enough for mass-murderers!’ ‘What do you think of the Suez crisis, Mrs Aysgarth?’ ‘The Archbishop of Canterbury should declare that the entire disaster is a Moslem plot to humiliate a Christian country, and all the soldiers going to the Canal should wear crosses, like the Crusaders!’)

‘Aysgarth will never receive preferment now,’ said my father in deepest gloom after the Suez comment had been plastered over William Hickey’s Diary in the Daily Express. ‘How could that woman ever be a bishop’s wife? She’d outrage everyone in no time.’

Hating to abandon hope I said: ‘Could he still be a dean?’

‘Perhaps in one of the minor cathedrals a long way from London.’

‘Dido will never leave London except for Canterbury or York,’ said my mother dryly, but she was wrong. Late in 1956 after the Suez crisis had reached its catastrophic conclusion, Dido gave birth to her fifth and final child, a stillborn boy, and promptly lapsed into a nervous breakdown. From time to time in the past she had suffered from nervous exhaustion, but this episode was so severe that she was completely disabled. She had to spend a month in an establishment which was tactfully referred to as a convalescent home, and even when she emerged she could do no more than lie in bed in a darkened room.

‘I think she fancies herself as Camille,’ said Primrose. ‘I’m just waiting for the first little consumptive cough.’

‘Maybe she’ll commit suicide,’ I suggested.

‘Not a hope. That sort never does. Too damn selfish.’

The day after this conversation Aysgarth turned up on the doorstep of our London home in Lord North Street, a stone’s throw from Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament. My mother was out at a charity coffee-party, my father was downstairs in his study and I was lolling on the sofa in the first-floor drawing-room as I reread Middlemarch. By this time I was almost twenty and had recently returned with relief to England after enduring weeks of exile with family friends in Florence.

When I heard the doorbell I laid aside my book and padded out on to the landing. In the hall below me the butler had just opened the front door and Aysgarth was saying: ‘Lord Flaxton’s expecting me,’ but from the tone of his voice I realised I should abstain from cascading down the stairs to offer him an exuberant welcome. I paused, keeping well back from the banisters. Then as soon as the hall was empty I sped noiselessly down the staircase and pressed my ear to the door of my father’s study.

‘… and since you’ve always taken such an interest in my career,’ I heard Aysgarth say, ‘I thought you should be the first to know that I have to leave London. There’s no choice. Dido’s health demands it.’

My father at once became apoplectic with horror. I too was horrified but I did rouse myself sufficiently to check that my eavesdropping was unobserved. Fortunately a gossipy drone rising from the basement indicated that the servants had paused for elevenses. With confidence I returned my ear to the panel.

‘… and now that I’ve spoken to the psychiatrist,’ Aysgarth was saying, ‘I can clearly see that she needs to make a completely fresh start somewhere else. The tragedy is that back in 1946 she so desperately wanted to come to London because she felt that here she could play a major part in advancing my career. The present situation – and of course we all know my career’s ground to a halt – is very hard for her to bear.’

‘Quite. But nonetheless –’

‘The death of the baby was the last straw. Dido now feels she’s a failure at everything she undertakes in this city, and she’s convinced that she has no chance of happiness until she leaves it.’

‘But Aysgarth,’ said my father, trying to mask his despair by assuming a truly phenomenal gentleness, ‘that’s all very well for Dido, but what about you?’

‘I couldn’t live with myself unless I’d done everything in my power to make Dido feel successful and happy.’

There was a silence while my father and I boggled at this extraordinary statement. I was too young then to feel anything but a massive outrage that he should be acquiescing without complaint in the wrecking of his career, and it was only years later that I realised this was my first glimpse of the mystery which lay at the heart of his marriage.

‘It’s clear to me that I’m not meant to move any further up the ecclesiastical ladder,’ said Aysgarth at last when my father remained silent, ‘and I accept that. I confess I’d be happy to stay on in London and devote myself to my German interests, but obviously it’s time for my life to take a new turn.’

My father managed to say in a voice devoid of emotion: ‘I’ll see what I can do about a Crown appointment.’

‘That’s more than good of you, but quite honestly I think you’d be wasting your time if you tried to pull strings in Downing Street. I’m sure I must have the letters “W.I.” against my name in the clerical files.’

‘“W.I.”?’

‘“Wife Impossible”.’

‘Ah.’ There was a pause. Obviously my father was so appalled that he needed several seconds to frame his next question. It was: ‘Surely Bell can do something for you?’

‘Unfortunately no canonry’s likely to fall vacant at Chichester at the moment, and apart from Chichester Bell’s influence is mostly abroad – which is no use to me, since Dido couldn’t possibly cope with the stress of living in a foreign country. I’ll talk to Bell, of course, but –’

‘If he can’t produce anything suitable, Aysgarth, I believe your best bet would be to go straight to the top and talk to the Archbishop of Canterbury.’

‘He’s been implacably opposed to Dido ever since she criticised the hat Mrs Fisher wore at the Coronation.’

‘Oh God, I’d forgotten that disaster! All right, pass over Fisher. What about the Bishop of London?’

‘He’s fairly new and I still don’t know him well.’