ill with worry about me – and I just couldn’t risk him getting sick; he was now at an age when any illness could kill him. The third reason was that my ordination was looming on the horizon and I knew that once I was a priest no more dabbling with Debbies and Doreens would be possible. And the fourth reason was that I had just had a bad fright when a condom had broken and Tracy had mused: ‘It might be kind of fun to be pregnant.’ This remark horrified me so much that I even felt it was a call from God to reform. I prayed feverishly for the grace to alter my life, and on the morning of the day when I was due for my next chaste date with Rosalind I opened my eyes, sat bolt upright in bed and thought: I’ll do it.
So I did. I proposed and was accepted. Happy ending. Or was it?
The best thing about Rosalind was that I had known her all my life and found her familiarity relaxing. She was the granddaughter of a certain Colonel Maitland, now dead, who had been a friend of my mother’s and who had owned the largest house in Starrington Magna apart from the Manor. Rosalind still lived at this house with her parents. She was a church-goer, musical, intelligent and good-looking in that slim, slightly equine way which is such a recurring feature among the English upper-classes. She had a part-time job doing special flower-arrangements for a Starbridge florist, and was beginning to receive freelance commissions to plan the floral side of weddings. Kind, friendly and a good organiser, she clearly had all the right attributes for a clerical wife, and I could now look forward to living happily ever after.
‘There’s one big favour I want to ask you,’ I said. ‘Could we keep the engagement unofficial at the moment? I’d like to announce it on the day of my ordination.’
Now, why did I say that? I didn’t like to think. But Rosalind, perfect Rosalind, said what a super idea, we’d then have a double reason to celebrate, what fun it would be tossing back all the champagne.
‘Do we keep absolutely mum?’ she added. ‘Or do we let the cat out of the bag to a favoured few?’
I was anxious to set my father’s mind at rest. ‘Okay, a favoured few – but no notice in The Times yet.’
Rosalind’s parents were delighted. Rosalind’s best friend was delighted. Rosalind’s favourite godmother was delighted. My father professed himself delighted but went right on being crucified by an anxiety which was invisible to the eye but searing to the psyche.
A week later I wound up in bed with Tracy at Langley Bottom.
At that point, being twenty-five years old and no fool, I realised that unless I got help in double-quick time I was going to crash into the biggest mess of my life. I couldn’t talk to my father. He might have died, finally tortured to death by his anxiety. I couldn’t talk to Aelred Peters. Resourceful though Father Peters was in treating the problems caused by abnormal psychic activity, I felt that mopping up something so prosaic as a sex-mess would be beyond him. But there was still one man who I thought could help me.
I made an appointment to see the Bishop of Starbridge, Dr Charles Ashworth.
VII
Bishop Ashworth was the main reason why the Theological College was a dead loss, but in my hour of need I didn’t let that prejudice me against him. In his pre-episcopal days he had been a distinguished professor of divinity at Cambridge. That was the problem. It’s dangerous to let divinity professors out of their ivory towers to roam unfettered through the Church of England; the temptation to convert theological colleges into minor outposts of major universities is apparently irresistible, but theological colleges are supposed to train priests for the priesthood, not intellectuals for the groves of Academe.
To be fair to Uncle Charles I have to admit he was a good bishop, and I have to acknowledge that at least he had had the guts to come out of his ivory tower and shoulder a top executive position in the real world. It wasn’t his fault that he got his kicks out of an academic approach to religion. That was just the way he had been designed by God. The important thing was that this intellectual kink hadn’t prevented him from being a devout Christian who had no hesitation in standing up for what he believed in. I wasn’t sure I believed all he believed in – he was an ultra-conservative wedded to what he called the ‘absolute truths’ – but I respected his courage and I admired him as a good man who had always been kind to me.
He was an old friend of my father’s; my father had been his spiritual director since 1937. There were very few people my father saw any more, but the Bishop was one of them. Uncle Charles kept an eye on my father. He had also kept an eye on me since my mother’s death, and he regularly invited me to the South Canonry, the bishop’s official residence in the Cathedral Close.
During his Cambridge days the undergraduates had nicknamed him Anti-Sex Ashworth because of the hard line he always took against sexual transgression, but I had long since sensed, by that mysterious process so difficult for any psychic to describe, that he wasn’t anti-sex at all but a man of the world who, somewhere along the line, had encountered a sexual catastrophe which had made him feel called to hammer out repeated warnings about how dangerous immorality could be. Seeking help from a conservative bishop tough on sexual sin – the bishop who would shortly be ordaining me – might seem as suicidal as putting my head in a lion’s mouth, but I felt I needed someone morally tough to beat me into shape, just as I needed a priest who could tackle a sex-mess without flinching. I wasn’t sure how much to tell him – obviously the minimum, but how minimal was the minimum? – and I wasn’t even sure I’d be able to tell him anything, but all I knew was that I had to try.
I called him ‘Uncle Charles’ because my father belonged to the generation who thought children should address their parents’ close friends by courtesy titles. When I reached twenty-one the Bishop had invited me to drop the title, but this had proved impossible. He was so formidably elegant and distinguished, and his date of birth in 1900 was so very far removed from mine.
‘Well, Nicholas!’ he said, giving me his best smile as we settled ourselves in his study after the ritual exchange of small-talk. Uncle Charles’s best smile always reminded me of a toothpaste advertisement. It flashed with great effect on television whenever he was hauled on to discussion programmes to oppose the permissive society.
‘Well, Uncle Charles!’ I responded warily, trying to beat back a burst of fright.
‘How are things going?’ enquired the Bishop, laying on the charm with a shovel in an effort to put me at ease.
‘Great!’ I said, feeling more nervous than ever.
‘Splendid!’ exclaimed the Bishop with enthusiasm.
We eyed each other in silence for some seconds while the Bishop kept his smile nailed in place and I struggled to master my panic, but at last I managed to say: ‘Uncle Charles, I wanted to see you because, well, I thought, that’s to say, wondered if you might possibly, sort of, well, you know, help me.’
‘My dear Nicholas, of course!’ said the Bishop, still oozing the charm which was such a famous feature of his public persona, but beyond this routine response I could sense his real self unfolding in a spontaneous surge of concern. The Bishop had an interesting psyche where sensitivity and an idealistic nature were kept under ruthless control by his first-class intellect and his considerable sophistication. Yet this complex personality, which could have produced a divided man, was seamlessly integrated. The glittering public persona was the servant, not the master of his true self beyond; its job was not to impress people but to create a shield behind which his true self had the privacy to flourish.
I hadn’t the experience in 1968 to put this judgement into words, but I did know by instinct that
