‘I don’t like the French Riviera.’
‘Well, you certainly won’t like the Hebrides. Dr Johnson thought it was quite awful, he told Boswell so.’
‘I don’t like Dr Johnson.’
‘Venetia dear, don’t you think you’re being just the teensiest bit negative?’
‘I’m sorry, Mrs Aysgarth. It really is so kind of you to worry about my spiritual welfare, and I’ll think very carefully about everything you’ve said, I promise.’
We looked at each other. Her hard dark eyes bore a sharp, shrewd, sceptical expression, and although I tried to exude a docile respect I knew she was not deceived. Rising to her feet abruptly she said: ‘I must see about lunch. Why don’t you come indoors and have a chat with Elizabeth? She always feels so hurt when you and Primrose go out of your way to ignore her.’
Smiling meekly but seething with rage I followed her into the house to talk to her daughter.
II
Primrose usually ate her meals in her flat, but for Sunday lunch, that sacred British institution, she joined her family in the Deanery dining-room, and on that Sunday before Easter I sat with her at the long table. As usual on such occasions, a crowd turned up. In addition to Dido’s two children – not only Elizabeth, who was now a precocious fourteen, but little Pip, who was a nine-year-old pupil at the Choir School – there was a female called Miss Carp, known within the family as Polly (in memory of Polycarp, a bishop of the Early Church); she kept the household running while Dido poked her nose into everyone else’s business, popped up to London to patronise Harrods and pampered herself with the occasional attack of nervous exhaustion, a condition which Primrose described as ‘sheer bloodyminded self-indulgence’. There had been a succession of au pair girls who had looked after the children, but these creatures had been dispensed with once Pip had begun his career at the Choir School.
The other guests at lunch that day consisted of Aysgarth’s second son by his first marriage, Norman, who lectured in law at King’s College, London, Norman’s wife Cynthia who always looked as if she might sleep with everyone in sight but probably never did (although my sister Arabella always said Cynthia was the vainest, most sex-mad girl she ever met – and coming from Absolutely-the-Bottom Arabella that was really something), Aysgarth’s third son James, the jolly Guardsman who was so good at talking about nothing, James’s girlfriend, whose name I failed to catch although it was probably Tracy or Marilyn or something non-U, Aysgarth’s fourth and final son by his first marriage, Alexander, known as Sandy, who was doing postgraduate work up at Oxford, a chum of Sandy’s called Boodle (I never found out his real name either), two elderly female cousins of Dido’s from Edinburgh who appeared to be quite overwhelmed by all the English, Primrose, me and – inevitably – Aysgarth’s most devoted hanger-on, Eddie Hoffenberg. The two people whom I most wanted to see – Aysgarth’s eldest son Christian and his wife – were conspicuous by their absence.
‘They were here last weekend,’ explained Primrose.
All Aysgarth’s children visited their home regularly and all appeared to get on well with their father who was unfailingly benevolent to them. The contrast with my own family could hardly have been more marked. My elder brother Harold was too stupid to hold my father’s attention for long, and although my brother Oliver was no fool – no genius but no fool – he too was uninterested in intellectual matters. Henrietta, Arabella and Sylvia could only be regarded by my father as pretty little playthings. I drove him up the wall. In consequence family gatherings were notable for my father’s impatience and irritability, my mother’s valiant efforts to pour oil on troubled waters, and my siblings muttering to one another in corners that ‘Pater’ really was getting a bit much and Mama had to be some kind of saint to stand him and only a liberal supply of champagne could save everyone from going completely and utterly bonkers.
At the Aysgarths’ lunch that day everyone talked animatedly, Dido inflicting her usual outrageous monologues on her defenceless cousins – with occasional asides to Eddie Hoffenberg who took seriously his Christian obligation to be charitable – Norman commenting on some judge named Denning (this was just before the Profumo affair made Denning famous), Cynthia describing the work of some besotted artist who yearned to paint her portrait, James saying: ‘Realty? How splendid!’ at intervals, Sandy and Boodle arguing over the finer points of Plato’s Dialogue on the Soul, Elizabeth throwing out the information that actually she was an Aristotelian and that Plato simply rang no bells for her at all, Primrose arguing that the whole trouble with the Roman Church was that St Thomas Aquinas had based his Summa on Aristotle’s philosophy, and my Mr Dean chipping in to observe that the world was always divided into Aristotelians and Platonists, and wasn’t the treacle tart absolutely first-class. In the midst of all these stimulating verbal fireworks, little Pip, who was sitting thoughtfully on my left, turned to me and said: ‘Do you like the Beatles, Venetia?’
‘They’re a little young for me, Pip, but I liked “Love Me Do”.’
‘I think they’re fab,’ said Pip. ‘Much better than Plato or Aristotle.’
One of the most attractive aspects of life with the Aysgarths was the wide range of the topics discussed. I doubt if my parents and siblings had heard of the Beatles in the spring of ’sixty-three.
Later in the drawing-room I had an interesting talk about politics with Norman but Cynthia became jealous and winkled him away from me. By this time the Dean had shut himself in his study for his post-prandial snooze, but Eddie Hoffenberg was still hovering as if eager to tell me about his osteopath, so I slipped away to take refuge in Primrose’s flat. Primrose herself had departed after lunch with her boyfriend Maurice Tait, one of the vicars-choral who sang tenor in the Cathedral choir and taught at the Choir School. In fact she cared little for Tait (a damp, limp individual whose hobbies were stamp-collecting and supporting the Bible Reading Fellowship) but she liked to keep him around so that she could talk about ‘my boyfriend’ and look worldly. I didn’t despise her for this. I wouldn’t have minded a neutral escort myself, if only to silence the fiends who muttered: ‘Poor old Venetia!’ behind my back, but no limp, damp individual had presented himself for acquisition. I didn’t count Eddie, of course. Not only was his Wagnerian gloom intolerable but he was so ugly that if I had accepted him as an escort the fiends would merely have gone on muttering: ‘Poor old Venetia!’
I also had to face the fact – an unpalatable one for my ego – that Eddie had never actually tried to do more than trap me in corners and talk about his health. He had never invited me to his house on my own or suggested a visit to the cinema – or even invited me for a walk on a Sunday afternoon. Tait always took Primrose for a walk down by the water-meadows after he had lunched with his mother. Primrose would sigh beforehand and say what a bore these walks were, but I suspected that if Tait had failed to appear one Sunday she would have been very cross indeed.
The rest of the day passed most agreeably, providing a tantalising glimpse of what fun life could be when one was accepted by a group of congenial people; at least at the Aysgarths’ house I was never left out in the cold. After tea we all played croquet and I beat everyone except Boodle. There was much laughter as we languished on the lawn. Then having completed my odyssey among the croquet hoops I ate baked beans on toast with Primrose in her flat and we discussed Life, a ritual which involved reviewing the day’s events, pulling everyone to pieces, putting a few favoured individuals together again and tossing the rest on the scrap-heap. This was fun. Primrose had her faults (priggishness, intolerance, intellectual snobbishness) but she was witty and seldom bored me. I only became bored when she was either talking soppily about her father or droning drearily about her work at the diocesan office on Eternity Street. Every time she began a sentence with the words The Archdeacon and F, my teeth automatically