no longer an episcopal perk, and the Ashworths were aided only by a man who came once a week to civilise the lawns with a motor-mower. Mrs Ashworth hated gardening and kept no plants in the house. I always found the bare, uncluttered look in her home immensely appealing.
As I was almost the same age as Charley I had been invited to the house occasionally in the past along with various Aysgarths and other young people in the diocese, but the visits had been infrequent and I had never come to know the Ashworths well. Neither had my parents. My father respected the Bishop’s intellect but found Ashworth was fundamentally unsympathetic to his sentimental, old-fashioned brand of humanism. Whereas Aysgarth was tolerant of agnostics Ashworth seemed hard put to conceal his opinion that agnosticism was an intellectual defect – and there were other differences too, as we all discovered over the years, between the Bishop and the Dean. Aysgarth was gregarious with an apparently inexhaustible supply of good humour, whereas Ashworth, behind his cast-iron charm, was a very private, very serious man. Laymen like my father dubbed Ashworth ‘churchy’ – that sinister pejorative adjective so dreaded by clerics – but Aysgarth was unhesitatingly labelled ‘one of us’. Ashworth, isolated to some degree by the eminence of his office, was held to resemble Kipling’s cat who walked by himself; his close friends had been left behind in Cambridge in 1957, and perhaps this was one of the reasons why he was so close to his wife. It was widely observed how well attuned they were to each other. They seemed to generate that special harmony which one finds more often among childless couples, the harmony of two people who find each other entirely sufficient for their emotional needs.
Considering that the marriage was successful, people found it immensely interesting that the two sons should have undergone such obvious problems: Charley had run away from home when he was eighteen while later Michael had been thrown out of medical school. However, these embarrassing episodes now belonged to the past. Charley had been rescued, sorted out and replaced on the rails of conformity, while Michael had been steered into the employment of the BBC with happy results. Why Charley should have run away from home no one had any idea, but Michael’s hedonistic behaviour was universally attributed to a desire to rebel against his father’s puritanical views on sin.
‘There’s a screw loose in that family somewhere,’ Dido would say darkly, ‘you mark my words.’
The irony of this statement was that Aysgarth had the biggest possible screw loose in his family – Dido herself – yet all his children were turning out wonderfully well. This fact must have been very galling to the Ashworths as they struggled to surmount their problems at the South Canonry.
When I arrived at the house that afternoon I was immediately soothed by its well-oiled serenity. The drawing-room was notably dust-free and arranged with a tidiness which was meticulous but not oppressive. A superb tea was waiting to be served. The telephone rang regularly but was silenced almost at once by the Bishop’s secretary in her lair by the front door. Dr Ashworth himself was out, fulfilling an official engagement, but if he had been present he too would have been running smoothly, just like the house. I could remember him appearing during my past visits and saying to his wife: ‘What did I do with that memo on the World Council of Churches?’ or: ‘Whatever happened to that letter from the Archbishop?’ or: ‘What on earth’s the name of that clergyman at Butterwood All Saints?’ and Mrs Ashworth, indestructibly composed, would always know all the answers.
After tea Charley went upstairs to unpack, Nick wandered outside to tune into the right nature-vibes – or whatever psychics do in gardens – and Mrs Ashworth took me upstairs to her private sitting-room. Unlike my mother’s boudoir at Flaxton Hall there were no dreary antiques, no ghastly oil-paintings of long-dead ancestors, no boring photographs of babies and no vegetation in sight. The air smelt celestially pure. On the walls hung some black-and-white prints of Cambridge and a water-colour of the Norfolk Broads. The only framed photograph on the chimney-piece showed her husband as an army chaplain during the war.
‘Sit down,’ said Mrs Ashworth, closing the door. ‘Now that we’ve got rid of the men we can relax. Cigarette?’
‘I do like this room,’ I said, accepting the cigarette and sinking into a comfortable armchair. ‘It’s all you, isn’t it? Everything’s your choice. All my life I’ve had to put up with revolting inherited furniture and now I’ve finally reached the point where I’m determined to have a place of my own.’
‘Splendid! All young people need to express themselves through their surroundings. You should have seen Michael’s room when he went through his Brigitte Bardot phase!’
‘I bet Charley puts up all the right pictures,’ I said, not daring to ask what the Bishop had thought of the Bardot pin-ups.
‘Fortunately Charley only has space on his walls for books. My former employer Bishop Jardine left Charley his entire theological library – no doubt because Charley always said he wanted to be a clergyman when he grew up … But let’s get back to you. So you’re seeking a room of your own! But why seek it in Starbridge?’
‘I’m not sure that I will – I’ve only drifted down here because I’ve got a standing invitation to use the Put-U-Up sofa in Primrose’s flat. I’m such a drifter, Mrs Ashworth! I despise myself for drifting but I don’t seem able to stop. It’s as if I’m marking time, waiting for my life to begin, but nothing ever happens.’
‘When will you consider that your life’s begun? At the altar?’
I was grateful for her swift grasp of my dilemma. Well, I know marriage shouldn’t be the be-all and end-all of a woman’s life, but –’
‘It certainly was before the war. Perhaps this is a case where “the more things change the more they remain the same”.’
‘I think it must be. As I see it, I really do have to get married in order to live the kind of life I’d enjoy, but here I am, almost twenty-six, and I’m beginning to think: supposing I never marry, never win respect and status, never stop drifting – I could wind up wasting my entire life.’
‘A nightmarish prospect.’
Terrifying. And then I start to feel desperate – desperate, Mrs Ashworth, I can’t tell you how desperate I feel sometimes – and now I’m convinced I’ve got to act, got to get out of this rut –’
‘Well, it sounds to me as if you’re making progress at last! You’re looking for a place where you can express your real self; you’ve embarked on an odyssey of self-discovery … Do you have to worry about money?’
‘No, I’ve got a hefty income because I came into money from both my godmothers when I was twenty-one. Maybe that’s part of the problem? If I were penniless –’
‘– you’d hate it. I did. Now let’s consider your situation carefully –’
‘I don’t have a situation, Mrs Ashworth, I just have a non-event.’ The words suddenly began to stream out of my mouth. ‘I want to live – I mean live – I want to swill gin and chat about philosophy with a gang of brilliant people and smooch with handsome men and dance till dawn and burn the candle at both ends, but all I get are boring nine-to-five jobs, social events where I’m an embarrassing failure, no love-life and evenings spent swilling gin on my own while listening to Radio Luxemburg. I’ve never had a boyfriend. I did belong to a gang of clever people but they were all girls. Here I am, bursting to join in the Great Party of Life yet confined to the margins by my utter lack of sex appeal, and it’s awful, Mrs Ashworth, absolutely awful, so utterly vile and unfair –’
‘But anyone,’ said Mrs Ashworth, ‘can have sex appeal. It’s simply an attitude
