Glittering Images (6 page)

‘What exactly
is
Muscular Christianity?’ inquired Mrs Jardine. ‘I’ve never been quite sure. Is it just groups of nice-looking young clergymen like Dr Ashworth?’

‘“Angels and ministers of grace defend us!”’ said the Bishop, raising his eyes to heaven as he quoted
Hamlet.

‘More sherry, anyone?’ said Miss Christie, finally escaping from Colonel Cobden-Smith.

‘Dinner is served, my Lord,’ said the butler in a sepulchral voice from the doorway.

The dining-room was as vast as the drawing-room and it too faced down the garden to the river. I had wondered if the gentlemen were required to ‘take a lady in’ to dinner, but Mrs Jardine gave no instructions and as we all wandered informally into the dining-room I was hoping I might claim the chair next to Miss Christie. However there were place-cards, and a quick glance told me I was to be disappointed. Although I shared with the Bishop the pleasure of being seated next to Lady Starmouth my other neighbour proved to be the formidable Mrs Cobden-Smith and meanwhile, far away on the opposite side of the table, Miss Christie was once more finding herself trapped with the Colonel; to my irritation I saw he was clearly delighted by his undeserved good fortune.

After the Bishop had said grace we all embarked on a watery celery soup, a disaster which was subsequently redeemed first by poached trout and then by roast lamb. The main course was accompanied by a superb claret. I almost asked the Bishop to identify it, but decided he might subscribe to the view that in Church circles a keen interest in wine was permissible only for bishops or for archdeacons and canons over sixty. With a superhuman exercise of will-power I restricted myself to two glasses and was aware of Jardine noticing as I declined a third.

‘Leaving room for the post-prandial port, Canon?’

‘Oh, is there port, Bishop? What a treat!’ I assumed an expression of innocent surprise.

The dinner surged on, everyone talking with increasing animation as the claret exerted its influence. Mrs Cobden-Smith asked me about my background, and having established the exact shade of my class she was sufficiently reassured to give me the benefit of her opinions which ranged from the futility of giving the working classes houses with bathrooms to the folly of listening to the Indian natives who wanted independence. When I could escape from Mrs Cobden-Smith’s attentions Lady Starmouth pounced and I found myself being subjected to a far more subtle inquisition. Lady Starmouth wanted to know about my wife, but when I volunteered little information in response to her oblique enquiries she decided to probe my views on a topical subject affecting matrimony; I was asked what I thought of A. P. Herbert’s celebrated Marriage Bill which had triggered Jardine’s attack on Lang in the Lords.

The knowledge of how much I owed the Archbishop was never far from the surface of my mind. I said politely, ‘I’m afraid I disapprove of divorce being made easier, Lady Starmouth.’

‘My dear Dr Ashworth, you surprise me! I thought you’d have very liberal modern views!’

‘Not if he’s the Archbishop’s man,’ said our host, breaking off his conversation with Mrs Jennings.

‘I’m no one’s man but my own, Dr Jardine!’ I said at once. I felt unnerved as well as annoyed that he had seen straight through my dutifully conservative stance.

‘Well spoken!’ said Lady Starmouth.

‘Do you approve of divorce at all, Canon?’ said Lord Starmouth with interest.

This placed me in a fresh dilemma. If I wanted to be entirely loyal to Lang, who followed the teaching on divorce in St Mark’s Gospel, I would have to say that I believed marriage to be indissoluble, but I was now anxious to show Jardine that I was no mere sycophantic echo of the Archbishop. On the other hand some loyalty to Lang was essential; I could hardly espouse Jardine’s extreme and controversial views. I decided to seek the diplomatic middle course by jettisoning St Mark in favour of St Matthew.

‘I believe,’ I said, ‘that adultery should be a ground for divorce – for both sexes, just as Our Lord said.’

‘So you disapprove of the rest of A. P. Herbert’s Bill?’ said Jennings, coming late to the conversation and manifesting the teacher’s desire to clarify a clouded issue. ‘You don’t believe that the grounds for divorce should be extended to include cruelty, insanity and desertion?’

‘Precisely.’

‘So!’ said Jardine, unable to remain silent a moment longer, his amber eyes lambent at the prospect of debate. ‘You would approve a divorce, would you, Dr Ashworth, if a man spends ten minutes in a hotel bedroom with a woman he’s never met before – yet you would deny a divorce to a woman whose husband has subjected her for years to the most disgusting cruelties?’

‘I’m not denying the remedy of a legal separation in such a case.’

‘In other words you’d condemn her to a miserable limbo, unable to remarry! And all because you and the other clerics who tow the High Church line insist on clinging to an utterly fallacious interpretation of Our Lord’s teaching in the Synoptic Gospels!’

‘I –’

‘You don’t seriously think Our Lord was talking about divorce as a lawyer, do you?’

‘I think Our Lord was talking about what he believed to be right!’ I was aware that all other conversation in the room had ceased; even the servants by the sideboard were transfixed.

Jardine said truculently, ‘But he wasn’t talking legalistically – he wasn’t, in advance of Christian history, claiming to be another Moses, the supreme law-giver. He was a life-giving spirit, not a legal code personified!’

‘He was indeed a life-giving spirit,’ I said, ‘and he illustrated the true life of Man – he made clear the principles of right human action, and I think we ignore his teaching at our peril, Bishop!’

‘But what exactly was his teaching on divorce?’ demanded Jardine, ripping open the hole in my argument. ‘The Gospels don’t agree! I think the clause permitting divorce for adultery was inserted into St Matthew’s Gospel in an attempt to correct the legalistic way in which the early Church had thoroughly misunderstood the teaching of Jesus –’

‘That’s Brunner’s theory, of course, but Brunner’s notorious for remodelling Christianity to suit the twentieth century –’

‘Brunner’s
reinterpreting
Christianity
in the light of
the twentieth century, and what’s wrong with that? Every generation has to interpret Christianity afresh –’

‘Bishop, are you saying that A. P. Herbert has a license to rewrite St Matthew?’

‘– and one of the outstanding aspects of Christianity is that Christ preached compassion and forgiveness, not an inflexible hardness of heart. How long were you married, Dr Ashworth?’

‘Three years. But –’

‘And during those three years,’ pursued Jardine, ‘did you have no glimpse of what the state of matrimony could be like for others less fortunate than yourself?’

‘That’s absolutely irrelevant to the theological point under discussion!’

‘You
were
happily married, I assume?’

‘Yes, I was – and that’s exactly why I’m opposed to debasing the institution of marriage by a set of fashionable divorce laws which go far beyond the teaching of Christ!’

‘It’s people who debase marriage, not laws – people who would keep a couple yoked together in circumstances which would have made Christ weep! Tell me, how long have you been a widower? It must be hard for you to remain single when you regard marriage as such a blissfully ideal state!’

I hesitated. I was by this time very profoundly disturbed. I sensed I was losing control not only of the debate but of my inner equilibrium, the equilibrium which I had to maintain in order to be the man I wanted to be, and although I knew I had to terminate the conversation I could not see how to do it without a disastrous loss of face.

‘Well?’ demanded Jardine. ‘Why the long silence? Let me ask you again: how long have you been a widower?’

I saw the trap he was setting to expose my hypocrisy but I saw too that there was no escaping it. Pride and prudence combined to make an outright lie impossible. In defiance I said finally, ‘Seven years.’

‘Seven years!’ The amber eyes widened as I gave him the answer he wanted. I felt as if my soul had been X-rayed. Nausea churned in the pit of my stomach. ‘You surprise me, Dr Ashworth! You talk so sanctimoniously about the institution of marriage yet apparently you have little desire to marry again! Is this because of a belated call to celibacy? Or are you perhaps not quite such a stranger to marital unhappiness as you would have us all believe?’

He had tied me up in such a knot that I had no choice but to grab the sharpest knife to slash myself free. ‘I’m certainly no stranger to marital tragedy,’ I said. ‘My wife was killed in a car crash when she was expecting our first child, and I often think I’ll never recover from the loss.’

There was a silence. The light went out of Jardine’s lambent eyes, and for a second I saw the grief mark his face as a memory seared his mind. Around the table no one moved. The room seemed suffocating.

At last Jardine said, ‘I’m most extremely sorry, Dr Ashworth. I’ve no personal experience of losing a wife but I do know what it’s like to lose a child. Forgive me for trespassing so intolerably on what must be a very deep and private grief.’

I was so conscious of shame that I was unable to speak. Jardine might not have exposed me as a fraud to his guests but he had exposed me as a fraud to myself, and I knew that to preserve my fraudulent mask I had taken the cheapest way out when I had had my back to the wall.

I was still groping for composure seconds later when the ladies withdrew and Colonel Cobden-Smith immediately announced his intention of retiring to the smoking-room. Lord Starmouth offered to accompany him, and after helping themselves to a glass of port apiece they departed in search of tranquillity after the débâcle at the dinner table.

‘I’ve such a strong aversion to smoking,’ Jardine explained to Jennings as the door closed behind the last servant, ‘that I insist on confining it to one room of the house.’ He turned to me with careful courtesy. ‘But perhaps you’d care to join the Colonel and Lord Starmouth, Canon – are you a smoker?’

‘Yes, but not when I’m wearing my clerical collar.’ My voice sounded astonishingly casual.

‘How admirable. And you, Jennings?’

‘I’m a non-smoker, my Lord.’

‘Even more admirable. Jennings, you may address me as “Bishop” or as “Dr Jardine” but leave “My Lord” to the servants, if you please. I think bishops suffer quite enough from delusions of grandeur without being addressed as if they’d been born to the purple … Well, gentlemen, you’ve just seen me at my worst and now I must make every attempt to display myself at my best. Dr Ashworth –’ he passed me the decanter ‘– I beg you to help yourself to the largest possible glass of port and to tell me about your new book. His Grace muttered something about fourth-century Christology and St Anselm, but as there appears to be no connection between the two subjects I confess I’m mystified – or are you perhaps hoping to prove that the seeds of the ontological argument were sown at the Council of Nicaea?’ And he gave me his most charming smile.

I smiled back to signal that I had every intention of supporting his attempt to restore a convivial atmosphere, and began to explain my plan to revise my lectures, but it was Jennings, not Jardine, who talked to me about St Anselm. The chaplain interposed a remark about the Cathedral library but sank into silence as the discussion of St Anselm’s theology degenerated into the dreariest type of academic debate.

Suddenly I said to Jardine, ‘I’m sorry, we must be boring you.’

‘Not in the least.’ He sipped his port. ‘I was merely wondering why you turn your back on the present to bury yourself in the remote past. But perhaps modern Church history would involve you in modern Church politics which is a subject best avoided if your views are unlikely to please the people in power.’

I recognized that this subtly dangerous statement was not an attack but an inquiry; he was giving me the opportunity to state that my career had not been distorted by the most unwholesome form of ambition, and I said at once, ‘I happen to find Arianism and Modalism more stimulating than the Oxford Movement.’

Jardine picked up the reference to Anglo-Catholicism. ‘Does that indicate a certain ambivalence about the High Church party?’

He was inviting me to disassociate myself from Lang, and suddenly I knew he would once again see straight through any profession of loyalty which was not entirely sincere. ‘I was sympathetic to Anglo-Catholicism when I was ordained,’ I said in a clumsy attempt at evasion.

‘So was I – that’ll surprise you, won’t it! But I can see now that I was merely trying to reject my Nonconformist background.’ He turned suddenly to his chaplain. ‘Gerald, I’ve promised to lend Mr Jennings that book by Brunner,
The Mediator.
Take him to the library, would you, and look it out for him.’

That disposed of Jennings and Harvey. I was alone with the Bishop at last and almost before the door had closed I found myself saying: ‘I’m beginning to think you see straight through everything.’

‘I have a first-class try. I sometimes think I know what life must be like for a musician who possesses perfect pitch. I have a well-nigh infallible ear for detecting false notes in a conversation.’

‘During our debate –’

‘During our debate you tried to conceal that your private views on divorce are rather different from your public views. Yes. I know. And that’s why I couldn’t resist the temptation to tear you to shreds, but I am indeed most sincerely sorry that the debate went so wrong.’