Susan Howatch - Scandalous Risks

‘So it’s all right for me to be interested in the Church, is it?’

‘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.