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Susan Howatch
SCANDALOUS RISKS
This novel is entirely a work of fiction.The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
HARPER
A division of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd 1990, then in paperback by Fontana 1991 and by HarperCollinsPublishers 1993
Copyright © Leaftree Ltd 1990
The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 978000739642
EBook Edition © JUNE 2012 ISBN: 9780007396412
Version: 2019-01-15
CONTENTS
COPYRIGHT
PART ONE
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
PART TWO
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
PART THREE
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
PART FOUR
ONE
TWO
AUTHOR’S NOTE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PRAISE
ALSO BY THE AUTHOR
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
‘For the true radical is not the man who wants to root out the tares from the wheat so as to make the Church perfect: it is only too easy on these lines to reform the Church into a walled garden. The true radical is the man who continually subjects the Church … to the claims of God in the increasingly non-religious world which the Church exists to serve.’
JOHN A. T. ROBINSON
Suffragan Bishop of Woolwich 1959–1969
Honest to God
‘We all need, more than anything else, to love and be loved.’
JOHN A. T. ROBINSON
Suffragan Bishop of Woolwich 1959–1969
Writing about Honest to God in the Sunday Mirror, 7th April 1963
I
I never meant to return to the scene of my great disaster. But one day, after yet another wasted weekend among alcoholic adulterers, I took a wrong turn on the motorway and saw the sign to Starbridge. Immediately I tried to escape. I drove up the next slip-road, but as I crossed the bridge to complete the U-turn I made the mistake of glancing south, and there, far away in the gap between the hills, I saw the spire of the Cathedral.
1988 dissolved into 1963. I glimpsed again my Garden of Eden, and as I hesitated at the wheel of my car, the rope of memory yanked me forward into the past. I forgot the U-turn, I forgot the motorway, I forgot my wasted weekend. On I drove to Starbridge along that well-remembered road which snaked between the hills before slithering to the floor of the valley, and ahead, appearing and disappearing with each twist of the road like some hypnotic mirage, the Cathedral grew steadily larger in the limpid summer light.
The city stood in the heart of the valley, but it was the Cathedral, eerie in its extreme beauty, which dominated the landscape, and as I stared at the spire
