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.
