Susan Howatch - Glittering Images

‘No, obviously there’s no time for other interests,’ I said. ‘Keeping that marriage glued together must be a very all-consuming occupation.’

She stopped dead. I stopped too, and as we faced each other I knew I had caught her off her guard.

‘Don’t misunderstand,’ I said swiftly. ‘I’m not calling you a liar. Earlier you made it plain that the marriage, despite its surface irritations, was a happy one involving that well-known phenomenon the attraction of opposites, and I see no reason to disbelieve that. Lady Starmouth also told me she thought the marriage was a success. But its success depends on you, doesn’t it? If you weren’t there to do all the things Mrs Jardine can’t do, the marriage would go to pieces along with Mrs Jardine – just as it did at Radbury before you arrived with your jar of glue to stick the pieces together again. Well, it’s always gratifying to one’s self-esteem to feel that one’s indispensable, but do you really think that once the Jardines are dead and you’re on your own at last you won’t look back and regret a lifetime of missed opportunities? Or are you simply going to say, as old Mrs Jardine said at the end of her life, “It was worth it all for Adam”?’

She was so pale that for the first time I noticed the faint freckles across her cheekbones. It was impossible not to conclude that I had shot an arrow into the dark and scored a bull’s eye, but all she said in the end was a stony, ‘I don’t call him Adam.’

‘Well, I should hope you don’t call him Alex either,’ I said, ‘or my imagination would really run riot. I’ve noticed he calls you Lyle whenever he isn’t referring to you as Miss Christie and I suppose it’s natural enough after ten years that he should follow his wife’s example in treating you as a highly favoured employee, but I’d certainly raise an eyebrow if you started calling him by his Christian name.’

‘Oh, shut up! You’ve made quite enough snide remarks for one afternoon!’

‘I thought I was making some intelligent observations in an attempt to solve the mystery!’

‘What mystery?’

‘The mystery you present to any man who admires you, the mystery of why you’re content to go through life as a mere companion –’

‘I’m beginning to think you’re the real mystery here, Charles Ashworth, with your interest in the Bishop and your Don Juan manners and the wife you won’t talk about and the past you gloss over so smoothly! Why are you going through this elaborate charade of making torrid passes at me?’

‘It’s no charade. I knew as soon as we met yesterday that I was deeply attracted to you –’

‘That’s the most unreal opening a sentence could have! You know nothing about me! You’re obviously deep in a romantic fantasy!’

‘Why don’t you tell me about this broken engagement of yours which has given you such a horror of romance?’

‘I’m telling you nothing more!’ She was taut with anger. ‘Take me home at once, please – I find this entire conversation deeply offensive!’

We walked on in silence, she hurrying as fast as she could without breaking into a run, I lengthening my stride to keep pace with her. At the car I said, ‘I’m extremely sorry if I’ve given you offence but please believe me when I say my admiration for you is genuine.’

‘I don’t want your admiration.’ Wrenching open the door she collapsed in a heap on the passenger seat; evidently I had shocked her to the core.

We did not speak throughout the journey back to Starbridge but as I halted my car in the palace drive I said, ‘Please give my apologies to Mrs Jardine and say I won’t be making an appearance at tea. I must do some work in my room on my St Anselm notes.’

‘Very well.’ She had regained her composure and although she was still pale her voice was calm.

I wondered how long it would take her to decide – greatly against her better judgement, of course – that she wanted me to make another pounce.

Upstairs in the cavernous Victorian bathroom I filled the bath to the halfway mark with cold water and sat in it for a while as I sluiced away both the sweat of my afternoon’s exertions and my very carnal thoughts on the subject of Miss Lyle Christie. Then I returned to my room, pulled on some underclothes and cast an eye over my St Anselm notes, but the glance was a mere formality. I wanted only to give a veneer of truth to my statement that I was missing tea in order to work, and eventually, my conscience assuaged, I began to imagine what I would have said to the Archbishop if he had appeared beside me and demanded a progress report.

I now knew very much more about Jardine than I had known before my arrival and I was certainly well on my way to building up a psychological portrait which would enable Lang to decide whether his enemy was the kind of man who could be disastrously exploited by Fleet Street, but I had still elicited no information about Lang’s chief worries, the journal and the possible existence of indiscreet correspondence. I myself was now convinced that Jardine was far too shrewd to commit epistolary indiscretions, but the journal remained an unknown quantity. No one had mentioned it to me yet, but this silence was hardly surprising if the journal were a long-standing hobby which everyone took for granted.

I meditated on the subject for a while but came to the conclusion that Jardine would have been unlikely to use the journal as a confessional during the lifetime of his stepmother. Why confide in an impersonal notebook when one had a confidante who provided limitless sympathy and understanding? I could imagine him tossing off some lines in a frenzy if his stepmother had been inaccessible, but I was sure that a ruthless censorship would have taken place once the sympathetic understanding had been obtained.

I then asked myself if he might have used the journal as a confessional since his stepmother’s death, but all my witnesses had testified that after the upheaval surrounding old Mrs Jardine’s arrival in Starbridge Jardine’s life had been unpunctuated by crises; possibly no confessional had been required. The chaplain had said Jardine had been getting on better with Lyle; Lady Starmouth had remarked that a spacious palace made it easier for a married couple to live in close proximity to a third party; Mrs Cobden-Smith had implied that by this time Lyle had been at her zenith as a miracle-worker. I suddenly remembered my friend Philip saying that Jardine had seemed distrait during the first year of his episcopate, and this observation from a stranger harmonized with the facts I now knew: the rocky start to the Starbridge career followed by years when Jardine was able to pursue his calling against a background of tranquillity. I decided that the journal was probably as dull as sackcloth and quite unworthy of a reduction to ashes.

At this point I paused in my meditations to light a cigarette but as I shook out the match my thoughts once more turned to the Lovely Ladies. I had already decided that because of the Bishop’s psychological constraint on the subject of class I could tell Lang with confidence that there was no risk of any scandal with an aristocratic Englishwoman, and although the incident with the foreigner Loretta Staviski could certainly be regarded with suspicion, I had believed Lady Starmouth when she had vouched for Jardine’s good behaviour. Jardine was popular with the ladies; that sort of clergyman always risked fatally attracting a parishioner, but in the vast majority of cases the clergyman was innocent of misconduct and I was sure that Jardine, newly married and no doubt burning to make a success of his splendid preferment, had had powerful reasons for treating Loretta with propriety.