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Authors: Susan Howatch
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child a chance to merge with the crowd!’ I heard her mutter exasperated to Marina, and the next moment she had swooped to my rescue by leading me to the most striking couple in the room.
The woman was dark, not one of my steamy brunettes but a romantic heroine who looked as if she had stepped out of some Victorian novel where women were idealised as angels – or perhaps out of some Victorian painting where the female figure was supposed to represent Purity in its endless battles against Lust. She had delicate features, pale skin and fine-boned, well-bred hands. I remember thinking: I wouldn’t want to go to bed with a woman like that because I’d be too afraid of breaking her.
The man who had apparently found this purity-on-a-pedestal fragility irresistible was lounging elegantly against the mantelshelf as if he owned not only the room but the house and the entire Cathedral Close. Tall, slim and dark, he coruscated with a glamour enhanced by an air of total self-confidence, the poise of a brilliant, sophisticated man who was well accustomed to the world grovelling at his feet. This aura of extreme worldly success fascinated me. I was also intrigued by the way the sensitivity of his face was marred by a thin, brutal mouth which had already, as if foreshadowing his middle age, begun to turn down slightly at the corners. I was surprised later when women sighed how handsome he was. That mouth ruined the film-star looks, but women, being women, obviously found it so sexy that they were incapable of seeing it as a blemish.
‘... and do you know the Aysgarths?’ Venetia was saying to me. ‘This is Christian – and this is his wife Katie ...’
I had heard much about this couple over the years, but I had never before managed to meet them. Christian’s father was the Dean of Starbridge, the priest who ran the Cathedral. A self-made man, he had a considerable reputation as an administrator and no inhibitions about flaunting his powerful personality. My father disliked him but the Dean had many devoted friends and admirers not only in Starbridge itself but through- out the diocese. It was widely noted that the Bishop, like my father, was not among them.
In the early 194-os when my father had first met him, the Dean had been the Archdeacon of Starbridge, but in 19+6 he had moved to London to become a canon of Westminster Abbey and an interval of eleven years had followed before he had returned to the diocese to take charge of the Cathedral. His eccentric second wife, Christian’s stepmother, invited me to a few parties at the Deanery because I happened to be only eighteen months younger than Christian’s brother Sandy, but when after one boring visit I consistently refused these invitations she at last gave up issuing them. I didn’t care for Sandy, whose idea of fun consisted of reading Greek poetry — in Greek — and the Dean’s other children were all either much older than I was or much younger.
Christian was fifteen years my senior, a fact which helps to explain why I had never met him before Marina’s Starbridge orgy; by the time his father returned to the diocese in 1957, Christian was a don up at Oxford, and once I had rejected his stepmother’s attempts to draw me into the Deanery’s junior social set, there was no reason why he should ever have encountered me. I did go to the Cathedral Close regularly to see the Ashworths, but since the Bishop and the Dean were constantly at loggerheads, contact between the Deanery and the South Canonry was minimal. Certainly on my visits to the Bishop’s house there was never an Aysgarth in sight.
Christian was the eldest child of the Dean’s first marriage. The second son, Norman, was a barrister who lectured in law; he was also at Marina’s orgy that night. There was a third son, James, whom at that time I had never met, a daughter, Primrose, whom I had glimpsed when Mrs Aysgarth had initially succeeded in dragging me to the Deanery, and finally my contemporary,
The woman was dark, not one of my steamy brunettes but a romantic heroine who looked as if she had stepped out of some Victorian novel where women were idealised as angels – or perhaps out of some Victorian painting where the female figure was supposed to represent Purity in its endless battles against Lust. She had delicate features, pale skin and fine-boned, well-bred hands. I remember thinking: I wouldn’t want to go to bed with a woman like that because I’d be too afraid of breaking her.
The man who had apparently found this purity-on-a-pedestal fragility irresistible was lounging elegantly against the mantelshelf as if he owned not only the room but the house and the entire Cathedral Close. Tall, slim and dark, he coruscated with a glamour enhanced by an air of total self-confidence, the poise of a brilliant, sophisticated man who was well accustomed to the world grovelling at his feet. This aura of extreme worldly success fascinated me. I was also intrigued by the way the sensitivity of his face was marred by a thin, brutal mouth which had already, as if foreshadowing his middle age, begun to turn down slightly at the corners. I was surprised later when women sighed how handsome he was. That mouth ruined the film-star looks, but women, being women, obviously found it so sexy that they were incapable of seeing it as a blemish.
‘... and do you know the Aysgarths?’ Venetia was saying to me. ‘This is Christian – and this is his wife Katie ...’
I had heard much about this couple over the years, but I had never before managed to meet them. Christian’s father was the Dean of Starbridge, the priest who ran the Cathedral. A self-made man, he had a considerable reputation as an administrator and no inhibitions about flaunting his powerful personality. My father disliked him but the Dean had many devoted friends and admirers not only in Starbridge itself but through- out the diocese. It was widely noted that the Bishop, like my father, was not among them.
In the early 194-os when my father had first met him, the Dean had been the Archdeacon of Starbridge, but in 19+6 he had moved to London to become a canon of Westminster Abbey and an interval of eleven years had followed before he had returned to the diocese to take charge of the Cathedral. His eccentric second wife, Christian’s stepmother, invited me to a few parties at the Deanery because I happened to be only eighteen months younger than Christian’s brother Sandy, but when after one boring visit I consistently refused these invitations she at last gave up issuing them. I didn’t care for Sandy, whose idea of fun consisted of reading Greek poetry — in Greek — and the Dean’s other children were all either much older than I was or much younger.
Christian was fifteen years my senior, a fact which helps to explain why I had never met him before Marina’s Starbridge orgy; by the time his father returned to the diocese in 1957, Christian was a don up at Oxford, and once I had rejected his stepmother’s attempts to draw me into the Deanery’s junior social set, there was no reason why he should ever have encountered me. I did go to the Cathedral Close regularly to see the Ashworths, but since the Bishop and the Dean were constantly at loggerheads, contact between the Deanery and the South Canonry was minimal. Certainly on my visits to the Bishop’s house there was never an Aysgarth in sight.
Christian was the eldest child of the Dean’s first marriage. The second son, Norman, was a barrister who lectured in law; he was also at Marina’s orgy that night. There was a third son, James, whom at that time I had never met, a daughter, Primrose, whom I had glimpsed when Mrs Aysgarth had initially succeeded in dragging me to the Deanery, and finally my contemporary,
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