Susan Howatch - Scandalous Risks

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 Confessions’ 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 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 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.